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CONFIDENTIAL
BRITISH EMBASSY
PEKING
NO. 51 21 September 1981
J Daly Esq
FCO
RECEIVED IN R
29 SEP 1981
REGISTRY Action
Marine, Aviation & Environmerie De Ten
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284
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UK/CHINA AIR SERVICES
1.
You will recall that at the recent round of talks it was agreed that CAAC should have rights to operate services from two or three additional Chinese cities to Hong Kong. I enclose herewith a Note from CAAC announcing their intention to begin, on 1 November, services from Tianjin and Nanjing to Hong Kong. I should be grateful if you would pass this Note to DOT.
2.
You will see that CAAC are proposing four flights per week from Tianjin to Hong Kong with Boeing 707's or Tridents. I would be most surprised if there was enough demand to justify such a frequency to and from Tianjin (there is very little of interest to the tourist in that city) and I suspect that CAAC are planning in effect to increase their Peking-Hong Kong services by using Tianj. in much the same way as they used Hangzhou while the Shanghai services were suspended. We should do what we can to monitor the route, when it comes into operation, to see whether CAAC offer a "through" service from Peking to Hong Kong via Tianjin, either by providing convenient feeder services from Peking to Tianjin or by using the same plane all the way, changing flight numbers in Tianjin. We should also try to discover whether the Peking- Tianjin-Hong Kong fare is the same as the direct Peking-Hong Kong
fare.
3.
If CAAC do abuse the route in the manner speculated above, there may be little that we can do about it until the review next year. But we should certainly air such grievances then, with all the evidence that we can gather.
4.
Furthermore, if the suspicion in para 2 above is justified, then I think we should be most careful in future about conceding "other Chinese cities" to CAAC. Such concessions may prove to be a good deal more valuable to CAAC, and harmful to us, than they might at first seem. We should not make them without seeking something in return.
You36-
R N Peirce CONFIDENTIAL.
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