CONFIDENTIAL
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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.
20.
One thing about the future is certain. Sooner or later we must discuss with the Chinese People's Government what will happen when the lease runs out in 1997. We know nothing about what China will be like when the two towering personalities that direct the present highly idiosyncratic regime have gone - as go they must within the next decade. Many things could happen that would make the future easier to negotiate. For instance, standards of living and the severity and oddities of the administration in China might soften and normalise. It is unlikely that anything could happen that would make the negotiations more difficult than they would be at present, and in any case the present leaders have said in terms that they wish to live with the status quo so the question need not arise. Therefore the later we leave this discussion the better. When that time comes the outcome will no doubt be determined principally by considerations over which Hong Kong itself has no control. But it seems to me that the best contribution it can make meanwhile is to put its house in order; that is to say to become as prosperous and cohesive and contented and as free from legitimate points of criticism as possible. Whether in the event this would make any difference or not one cannot
CONFIDENTIAL
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