TNAG-0801-FCO40-1005-Immigration-from-China-to-Hong-Kong-1978 — Page 36

W.Padley M.P.,

House of Commons,

Westminster,

London.

1

1

R.R.S. DISCOVERY

At Sea.

9.5.78.

Dear Walter,

I must apologise for burdening you with my personal problems but I am afraid you are the best person of my acquaintance who might be able to offer me an answer to a matter that has been bothering me. Whilst home on leave recently I watched a television programme on the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, the particular programme in the series that I watched was concerned with that colony's border with the People's Republic of China and the movement of people across that border, particularly refugees swimming across several miles of sea from the mainland to find a new home in Hong Kong. I am afraid that I am an idealist, or should I say just that I am an idealist (it is what made me join the Labour Party in the first place), and it horrified me to discover that the Hong Kong authorities were shipping these refugees back to mainland China if and when they caught them attempting to enter Hong Kong. Now I realise full well that there may be communist infiltrators amongst the refugees attempting to enter Hong Kong and that these might be undesirable by anyone's standards but these types are going to enter the colony one way or another anyway, but I am afraid that the thought of people trying to escape a system with which they disagree so strongly that they are willing to hike across the mainland of China and then endure a swim through the sea with strong currants and the possibility of sharks and death through exhaustion and

exposure being greeted by British authorities who return them to

the system from which they are trying to escape just is too much

for me to stomach. Now either the present Labour government inherited this policy from a previous conservative administration and have failed to see fit to do anything about it or they have

instituted this policy themselves, they cannot blame the local Hong Kong government for carrying out policies which are blatantly

immoral it is after all only a colonial government and the final