TNAG-0619-FCO40-767-Proposed-research-project-on-conditions-in-a-Chinese-village-1977 — Page 24

CONFIDENTIA

Euler

BY BAG

CR L/ 107/77

D

10

MISS E P MCGLE

не

8/AR/4560

(5

du. Dace. Francis' admirable Hella right to perfunds the

30 March 1977

okay to tuink again. If they

Найва do approach ys (Lee the frail popuph of du. D-F" hellow)

I think that we hund Supfront stouply wh

MINISTRY OF OVERSEAS DEVELOPMENT

UNGERS' RESEARCH PROJ LCT

д

no has said.

Tâm

5/4

hor

Please refer to our exchange of telegrams or the above subject, ending with our telegram No.

Reca. HODEV 29 of 29 March (not to others).

HKD

full report promised in that telegram.

2.

This is the

The facts about the Ungers' political activities in Hong Kong are as follows. As part of her research at the universities Service Centre here during 1974-6, Mrs unger (or Miss Anita CHAN as she then was) became friendly with a number of ex-Red Guards from China who had been sent down to the countryside as part of MAO'S Chinese Peace Corps programme and after taking part in the Cultural evolution, had arrived, mainly illegally, in Hong Kong. These were people whose idealistic fervour had been shattered wher. the Chinese bureaucracy reasserted itself over the forces of the Cultural kevolution and they stand to the left of the communi sk currently practised in China. The Chinese communists call them "ultra-left" or "Trotsky-ite".

3.

This anti-Establishment outlook fitted in well with the New Left socialism, which Miss CHAN had already imbibed in the UK, where she had been in contact with Walter Basey of the Hong Kong Research Project, a London. organisation aimed at attacking the Hong Kong Government from a New Left point of view. During the recession of 1974/5, several groups sprang up in fiong Kong with similar leanings and were active in staging protests and

Mone demonstrations against the Hong Kong Jovernment. of them were very serious, and in an effort to gain more support from the workers, these groups shifted their efforts avay from the Public Parks to workers' resettlement areas. On May Day 1975, a demonstration, in San Po Kong, an industrial estate area near the airport which had been the scene of some of the worst rioting in 1967, was

CONFIDENTIAL

-/2.