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shestaur
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This can be achieved only by corporate effort, and such a concept is new to Hong Kong where the tradition has been for people to do only more or less what they are told by Government and otherwise for charitable activities which carry social status to be as little bothered with corporate affairs as possible. I think that from now policy must aim to make both the elite and the masses feel, as they felt in 1967, that Hong Kong is an entity to which they belong, and the place they wish to live in.
19.
The impossibility of seeing far into the future is another feature which basically affects the pattern of life here. On the one hand the private sector foresees a period of continuing prosperity possibly limited in time, which leads to almost frenetic investment and construction. On the other there are less healthy symptoms - the tendency of the financially able and the academically qualified to establish foot- holds overseas, and the reluctance of the best products of our educational systems to identify themselves with Government - our uniformed services in particular are all short of desirably qualified candidates.
One thing about the future is certain. The two towering
personalities that direct the present highly idiosyncratic régime
in China will have gone within the next decade. We know nothing
about what China will then be like. Many things could happen
that would make relations easier and the aspect of China less
daunting and more predictable. For instance, standards of living and the severity and oddities of the administration in China
might soften and normalise. But these developments will be
determined by considerations over which Hong Kong itself has no
control. It seems to me that the best contribution it can make
meanwhile is to put its own house in order; that is to say to
become as prosperous and cohesive and contented and as free from
I believe such a legitimate points of criticism as possible.
policy is best suited to the long term as well as the short term
interests of the inhabitants, as well as being the one presumably
most acceptable to the British Government.
I think we have time
to achieve this happier state, but only just. This must therefore
be a Government in a hurry.
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