TNAG-0752-FCO40-956-Future-of-Hong-Kong-1979 — Page 59

CONFIDENTIAL

4. China (and the Chinese Nationalists) claim sovereignty over Hong Kong and regard the treaty and conventions described in paragraph 2 as "unequal". Since the British documents of the 1940s have been sent to the Public Record Office, an article by Chan Lau Kit-ching in the Journal of Imperial Commonwealth History on "The Hong Kong Question during the Pacific War", published in October 1973 has shown that serious consideration was given in Whitehall to the idea, pressed on the UK by China' and the USA, that the UK should not reassert her claim to Hong Kong as a colony after the war but should give up its sovereignty. In November 1942 the head of the Far Eastern Department in the FO, with the agreement of the Colonial Office, sent a note to Mr Eden suggesting that in 'the post war reconstruction the UK should not "regard the maintenance of British sovereignty over the Colony (of HK) as a matter beyond the scope of "discussion". Borth Churchill and Attlee, however, made it clear that they did not wish to give up Hong Kong, and in August 1945 the Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong at the time of its fall to Japan, Gimson, was instructed to restore "British Sovereignty" over Hong Kong. The Foreign Office instructed its staff to mention the Hong Kong question as little as possible. British possession of Hong Kong needed "no apology or justification" and the Americans were to be told that the future of Hong Kong was a question to be decided by the UK and China and no one else. Instructions on these lines have been repeated on a number of occasions since then. In an Intel in June 1964 Foreign Office staff were warned "The question of Bovereignty over the leased territories (of HK) is not entirely free from doubt... it is not considered advisable to make a wholesale denial of the HK claim to sovereignty".

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22 November 1976

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RS Bishop (Miss) Far Eastern Section Research Department