TNAG-0610-FCO40-758-Hong-Kong-annual-review-for-1976-1977 — Page 48

CONFIDENTIAL

Sir Murray MacLehose GBE KCMG KCVO

Governor

HONG KONG

HONG KONG: ANNUAL REVIEW 1976

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19 January 1977

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1. Your Review of the crucial year just passed has been read here with great interest. We are sending the dispatch for printing in the departmental series.

2. When trying to consider 1976 as a whole, one thing emerges clearly - that you and your officers are to be congratulated for putting into motion the beginning of an almost unprecedented programme of reforms and advances in the social fields. We here are particularly pleased (although perhaps you are not quite so enthusiastic) that your appointment has now been extended. Apart from our personal pleasure, it means that it will be your hand on the tiller during the early years of the new programme, a hand which is already personally committed to keeping the pot boiling.

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3. I was interested in your conviction, described in paragraph 10, that a most effective counter to some of the dislike and suspicion of Hong Kong manifest in Britain would be a substantial increase in British exports. We agree, of course, with the need for such an increase and of its utility in countering a part of the suspicion which we have all experienced over the justification for Hong Kong's continued existence as a dependency. You may not have seen the article by Martin Woollacott in the "Guardian" copy of which I am enclosing. However, as I have said to you on several occasions, I am always conscious of the fact that a lot of the criticism of Hong Kong here in Britain is not motivated by trade considerations only, but by what many of the critics regard, wrongly or rightly, as the injustices and shortcomings still existing in what is, after all, a comparatively wealthy society. Many of them too, of course, are motivated by a purely doctrinal dislike of the continued existence of a British colony. We are all in complete agreement that a necessary counter to that

segment of critics is the continued demonstration of your determination to set right, or to improve, those conditions of life in Hong Kong that are unsatisfactory, particularly for the poorer people.

JAB Stewart

CONFIDENTIAL