TNAG-0941-FCO40-1160-Visit-by-Lord-Carrington--Secretary-of-State-for-Foreign-and-1980 — Page 178

Mr Morrice

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SECRETARY OF STATE'S VISIT TO CHINA :

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FUTURE OF HONG KONG

AW 419

1. Mr Williamson let me have the attached drafts on Friday. I have not looked at them in detail and would be grateful for your comments.

2. We will need to revise the Points to Make for the Secretary of State's briefing to take account of Hong Kong Telnos 1081 and 1082. 1818I have discussed these with Sir E Youde. The following are the

main points:

a) In general the Governor's comments seem reasonable except that we should keep open the option to discuss leases at official level. This certainly was discussed. One of the possibilities was that officials accompanying the Secretary of State might continue to talk about the subject in the margins of the visit. However, depending on how the whole subject goes, I do not think we should rule out some agreement that consideration could continue after the visit, eg in talks to be conducted by the Embassy, We should expand paragraph 4 of the main Points to Make to accommodate this. I should also write to the Governor at some stage to explain our thinking. Presumably when we have got Mr Blaker's agreeemnt to this line.

b) In the supplementary brief we should put more weight on the idea of periodical leases. If possible, we should redraft in order to bring this further up in the order of items to be raised. Perhaps we could put it after paragraph 3 leaving it until later to explain that if we wanted formally to issue leases with a terminal date beyond 1997 some form of legislation would probably be necessary. In any case, I suggest that the wording of the passage on periodic leases should be on the lines of:

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One way of avoiding any problems of naming

a date beyond 1997 might be to issue periodic leases

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3. We have already discussed the need to get Peking's comments before we submit to Mr Blaker by the end of this week.

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1 September 1980

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