TNAG-0851-FCO40-1061-Future-of-Hong-Kong-New-Territories-leases-1979 — Page 29

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now visited eight foreign countries in the last 2 years,

while Deng has covered a similar number.

&

BACKGROUND TO THE VISIT

3. In formal terms the genesis of Premier Hua's visit to

Britain was an invitation issued by Mr Callaghan last

November, renewed at Chinese request by Mrs Thatcher

following the General Election. But from the Chinese

viewpoint the visit to Britain was but one leg of a tour

of Europe, and the tour of Europe one pillar of a global

strategy. Other parts of this strategic edifice had already

been buttressed by visits by Deng Xiaoping to the United

States, Japan and ASEAN, and by Hua Guofeng to the

independent-minded Communist states of North Korea,

Romania and Yugoslavia.

1. The development of the current Chinese view of Europe

goes back at least 10 years. The extravagant convulsions

of the Cultural Revolution and their drastic effects upon

China's diplomacy disguised until 1970 the most important

shift in China's world view since the founding of the PRC.

The struggle for succession in Mao's last years was a

further complication. But China now saw the Soviet Union

is a renegade socialist nation bent on world domination.

It was China's mission to rally all other forces in the

world in opposition to the menace of 'hegemony'. With

the succession crisis at least temporarily resolved, Deng

and (perhaps initially with less enthusiasm) Hua bent to

this task, stimulated also by the demands of China's

ewly reformulated modernisation plans. Deng characteristically

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/took