TNAG-1185-FCO40-1487-Resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-into-the--1982 — Page 78

GF 323

Part I

CONFIDENTIAL

機密

Summary of Overt Information

7th November

C

20th November 1982

HUANG Hua and GENG Biao Step Down from Foreign Affairs and

Defence Posts

Associated Press - 20th November

Foreign Minister HUANG Hua retired on Friday, while a specialist in modern technology has been appointed Minister

of Defence.

2.

HUANG (69) and ailing recently, has been replaced by WU Xueqian (60) and ZHANG Aiping (72) replaced GENG Biao (73) as Defence Minister, Xinhua reported. Both changes had been expected. They followed a massive Government reshuffle in May as DENG Xiaoping's leadership moved to streamline China's overstaffed bureaucracy and promote younger officials in the interests of efficiency and modernisation.

3.

Xinhua continued to identify HUANG as a State Councillor, a rank equivalent to Vice Premier but without the day-to-day administrative duties. GENG keeps his State Councillor rank too, and ZHANG has been elevated to that

level.

4.

5.

Both new ministers are closely identified with top leaders, WU with Party General Secretary HU Yaobang and ZHANG with DENG Xiaoping. Like DENG and HU, both were purged during the Cultural Revolution. HUANG and GENG were not.

HUANG was replaced one day after returning from Moscow, where he attended the funeral of Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and conferred with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko on improving relations. In his last public state- ment as Foreign Minister, HUANG said on Thursday that he was optimistic about vice ministerial consultations between the two, begun last month, three years after China broke off normalisation talks over the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

/6.

機密

CONFIDENTIAL ##