TNAG-0943-FCO40-1162-Future-of-Hong-Kong-1980 — Page 230

NIDUVW SIHL NI NZULIUM 38 OL ONIHLON

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CONFIDENTIAL

"The Central People's Government of the People's

Republic of China shall examine the treaties and agreements concluded between the Guomindang (Kuomintang) and foreign governments, and shall recognise, abrogate,

revise, or renegotiate them according to their

respective contents".

The new regine thus gave notice of only a conditional

succession to the treaties concluded between the Nationalist

Chinese and foreign governments. Now that it had assumed

power the CCP was in a position to reconsider some of the

treaties Mao had in 1939 considered new and "equal". The

outstanding.issues which these treaties had failed to resolve

would in due course lead to a re-interpretation of the term

"unequal treaties". Though a broader application, tae term

would be brought to apply to those treaties which related to

Hong Kong.

72. The Chinese Government did not move to an immediate

challenge to the status of Hong Kong. Nevertheless, the

underlying assumption that Hong Kong is considered Chinese

territory is apparent in a number of maps, atlases and

geography text-books published in China at the time. In showing

Hong Kong not as British territory, but as a part of China,

Communist publishers simply followed the practice adopted by

previous Chinese publishers. However, the new literature began

to issue more urgent demands for the return of Chinese "national

territory". A "Provincial Atlas of the People's Republic of China" (published in Shanghai in October 1950) showed no boundary at all between Guangdong (Kwangtung) Province and Hong

Kong, whilst an accompanying text describing the strategic location of Hong Kong called for the return of Hong Kong Island

and the leased territories. A text-book "Geography of New China" (published in Shanghai in August 1953) observed:

"Hong Kong was seized by Creat Britain after toe Opium War in 1842. The southern portion of the Kowloon Peninsula was forcibly coded to Great Britain in 1898 for 99 years.

After the victory of the last war, all the leased territories of our country have been returned excepting

Kowloon. Both Hong Kong and Kowloon are national

territories lost b. unequal treation and are still

occupied and used as political, commercial and military