BY BAG
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SECRET
This is quite interesting
Government
13
JF R Martin Esq
Far Eastern Department FCO
B.lace.
22 September 1976
24/5/76.
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DEATH OF CHAIRMAN MAO
I have been waiting until the end of the mourning week to let you have a round-up of reactions to MAC's death in Hong Kong, but no doubt you will already have seen some reports in the British press.
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2. As you will have gathered from our Telegrams Nos 916 and 923 of 13 and 15 september, our biggest cause of worry was not the communist reaction, but how the KMT were going to behave. It was certainly the KMT who seemed to wake up first to the news of the death and make most of it the rest of Hong Kong was rather bbated and sleepy after the mid-Autumn Festival, when we stay up late lighting lanterns, looking at the moon from high places and eating mooncakes. Apart from the incidents described in paragraph 4 of our Telegram No 916, the KMT press went into high gear to take advantage of the death and a number of offensive articles exulting at the demise of 'the monstrous ruler' were printed. The NCNA, despite other preoccupations, were obviously not slow to notice these insults, and When they called on Alan Donald on 13 September (at their own request after a suitable interval during which we did not disturb them) the old spark showed through/Victorian funeral garb when they produced a number of cuttings from the right-wing press, including one from a little known paper which had printed photographs of MAO upside down to celebrate his death. In fact the KMT calmed down considerably after their initial burst of exuberance, no doubt partly because of warnings which we had passed to them through private means and which were reinforced by the coincidence of the raid on the KMT agents carried out on 12 September. We know that the man whom the NCNA named as being responsible for the early troubles (CHOU Yi-Pin) was urging his followers not to take any extreme action, but later on a secret message was received from Taipei criticising the KMT leaders in Hong Kong for not being active enough, to which they apparently replied that any attempt to interfere with the ceremonies or to disrupt them would not be appropriate and would
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