Miss H Lackey
Commercial Relations & Exports Dept
Department of Trade & Industry
1 Victoria Street
London SW1
17 AUGUST 1972
John Towlson wrote to Cherry Welch on 24 July about the idea that we should take advantage of the British Industrial Exhibition to announce some special engineering scholarship assistance to Hong Kong and the related and converse idea that we might provide a technician for the new Polytechnic. When John Towlson wrote his letter I was still in the midst of my initial round of contact making calls and trying to gather together ideas emerging from them; his letter was therefore designed largely to keep the pot boiling. I would now,, in the light of my conversations, like to light another gas underneath it!
2.During my discussions both with officials and representatives of commerce, it has been borne on me time and again that there is a general feeling that the British Government and British Industry are losing interest in Hong kong, to a point of almost abdicating the field to the Japanese and others. The complementary argument is that because Hong Kong is virtually the last remaining colony and a pretty prosperous one at that, which could provide a valuable market to Britain, it behoves the British Goverrment and British Industry to show a particular interest and involvement in Hong Kong, not merely in terms of hard commerce but also assist- ing Hong Kong to develop its industry and its industrial tech- niques - in so far as these do not compete unacceptably with ou Own. This interest and involvement, it is suggested, should be manifested in some "aid" to Hong Kong. Those (and they are many) who advocate this, immediately anticipate the argument that Hong Kong is prosperous and therefore does not qualify for aid in the way that many developing countries do, by arguing that first it looks odd to them that we should help foreign countries before we help our own and second that in any case this is not a question (as it is with most foreign countries) of charitable aid being poured into a bottomless pit, but of enlightened self interest since the result would be to encourage people to think British (or, to put it another way, to stop the decline in their tendency to think British) and also to advertise british techniques, machinery and products in a country which one leading businessman described to me as being "the shop window into Asia".
3. Let me say at once that I accept that there is a lot of special
pleading in this and I recognise too the risks of idea by/
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