TNAG-1236-FCO40-1549-Future-of-Hong-Kong-1983 — Page 34

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BRITISH EMBASSY,

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24 February 1983

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A E Donald Esq

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Lecas Alain, HAKOWO 1982.

POSSIBLE UK-CHINA FRIENDSHIP TREATY

1.

+

7 MAR 1933

Thank you for your letter of 23 December and for copying to me your letter of 31 January.

2.

106

My view is that we have a long way to go before we need give this matter active consideration. There is no point in expending much effort now in discussing how best to present a solution to the Hong Kong question when we are yet far from the stage where we can see what sort of settlement we are likely to reach. I therefore agree that for the time. being this question should be shelved.

3. As for what advice I might offer if and when the time came to consider the question again, I would not dismiss the idea totally. However, the Friendship Treaty as signed by the Chinese has been a platitudinous document and somewhat hypocritically used. Looking at the list of Friendship Treaties signed by China in the fifties and sixties at the height of the fashion - with the USSR, GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Burma, Mongolia, DPRK, Nepal, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Yemen, Guinea, Ghana, Congo, Mali and Tanzania - it has a far from faultless pedigree and precious little to show for itself by way of concrete achievement. Even if it were appropriate to formalize Sino-British "friendship" (which it would not be if the Hong Kong settlement turned out to be too far from what we wished to see), I do not believe that a Friendship Treaty of the sort that China has signed in the past would, of itself, inspire confidence in Hong Kong's future.

4. That said, we may eventually find ourselves looking for some form of guarantee for "Charter Hong Kong". Such a guarantee would be most effective if it could be enshrined in a treaty of some kind, and we should therefore aim to have one, though it would need to have considerably more substance than a Friendship Treaty. However, the Chinese would most certainly see such a treaty as an infringement of sovereignty, and I would not expect them to accept the idea. The chances of China signing another treaty about Hong Kong must be remote in the extreme. In the end we should probably have to settle for something less.

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Sir Edward Youde GCMG MBE

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Yours wer

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PERCY CRADOCK