CONFIDENTIAL
Accompanying a head of state.
3
30 persons
Accompanying a deputy premier,
speaker of a parliament or a
deputy speaker.
20 persons
Accompanying a cabinet or
deputy minister.
10 persons
Costs of any excess numbers would be paid by the visiting party.
16
The FCO had written for clarification on a number of points as they,
for instance, would rank a Chinese deputy premier with a British cabinet minister.
17 After some discussion of this initiative the meeting agreed that the UK
had been rather too accommodating to the Chinese in not setting down firm rules for the size of their visiting parites and that the current Chinese action provided a good opportunity Br our rectifying this situation.
18
GHF rules (1 visitor plus party of 3) were more restrictive than the Chinese ones and the meeting agreed that it would want any guidelines to retain sufficient flexibility to enable the UK to maximise commercial opportunities presented by some particularly valuable Chinese missions.
19
The meeting agreed therefore that we did not have a ready made set of rules with which we could return to the Chinese and that some detailed work would be needed before we could formulate a definitive reply to their initiative. The four Departments principally concerned with financing inward ministerial visits (CSD, Trade, FCO and Defence) would form a sub-group to formulate draft guidelines for future visits before reporting back to the working group.
PRIORITIES FOR FUTURE HIGH LEVEL INWARD VISITS
20
The meeting considered the proposals made by the Ambassador in his letter of 27 May to FED which had accompanied Mr McLaren's letter of 10 June to Mr Dick..
21 Mr McLaren noted that the people proposed by the Ambassador would not be the only ones who would visit the UK over the next few years. Many inward missions, such as the Kang one for example, resulted from Chinese initiatives. However the Ambassador had identified the people that he considered to be of special importance to the UK and FED agreed with his assessment.
22
Mr Benjamin had some reservations, however, as he felt high level visitors fell into two distinct categories; (a) statesmen (such as Fang Yi and Gu Mu) from whose visits the UK expected to gain long term political and commercial advantage and (b) people functionally related to particular areas whom the UK would wish to invite as opportunity arose to help push individual projects. He included in this latter category the coal minister and the deputy mayor of Shanghai and suggested that while we would certainly wish to welcome these at some time we should allow commercial considerations to determine the moment of the invitation. Mr Milton agreed. He felt that a rash of invitations to this latter group now might make it harder for us to respond as opportunity arose later on..
23
Mr McLaren recognised this concern but made clear that the programme proposed · by himself and the Ambassador would not preclude Departments form issuing further invitations later on if they so wished.
24 Turning to the candidates for "statesmen" invitations, the meeting agreed with Mr Craddock's suggestion that the UK should invite Fang Yi and Gu Mu fairly soon. Mr Dick noted that Mr Nott was the appropriate host for Fang Yi
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