Dowty has a licensing agreement with Japan and this appears to have been the source. Clearly this is and Dowtys recognise this a wider issue affecting trade with China which we need
to consider carefully.
The other major area I covered was exchanges of information and experts. We made good progress on this with both the Minister of Railways and the Minister of Communications, whom I called on briefly. A number of Chinese engineers will be coming to Britain later this year on both the road and rail sides and I shall be sending one of my traffic control experts to Peking. I took the opportunity when I saw the Minister of Communications to repeat my invitation to him to visit Britain. There seems unfortunately little prospect of his making an early visit because he is clearly a sick man, but his area of responsibility ports, roads and traffic
communications
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is I am sure one with potential for us and I think exchanges and visits can only be useful.
My visit to Hongkong was necessarily short but I had time for talks with the Governor and some of the senior
members of the Hongkong Government. There are strains in relations at present notably over the Civil Aviation Authority's decision to grant British Caledonian rather than Cathay Pacific a licence on the Hongkong-London route and I have spoken to John Nott about this. During my visit I offered to second a road safety expert and a traffic management adviser to the Hongkong Government to help them with some of their considerable traffic problems and this offer was much
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