TNAG-1344-FCO40-1774-Despatch-from-Sir-Richard-Evans--British-Ambassador-to-China-1986 — Page 26

CONFIDENTIAL

Redacted

under FOI exemption 27(1)(a)(c)(d)

12.

-

It consisted of the hammering out

sentence by sentence and word by word of texts in the two groups. This was exceedingly hard work. Our teams, led by

Dr Wilson in the Working Group and by Mr McLaren in the Ad Hoc

Group, worked for up to 16 hours a day, Monday to Saturday (and

often on Sundays as well). I salute them. Their energy never flagged; and they maintained their sharpness both of mind and pen right through to the end. I also salute my three communic-

ators. Between 19 August and 18 September alone, they sent and received 2700 telegrams and over a million telegraphic groups.

Negotiating Strategy

For us,

13. What of the negotiating strategy of the two sides? the objective was simple: to find means of assuring Hong Kong's future stability and prosperity. We judged, I am sure rightly, that we should first try to exchange sovereignty for continued

British administration. This would, from the point of view of

people in Hong Kong, have been the surest guarantee that their

society would not change. When this proved unobtainable, we sought to secure three other objectives: the minimum of change in Hong Kong's economic and social systems after 1997, coupled with the maximum of insulation from the mainland; the detailed

spelling out in the agreement of arrangements to this end; and the expression of everything agreed in legally binding form.

14. Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian has described China's aims to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress as follows:

(i)

to recover Hong Kong and resume the exercise of

sovereignty over it no later than 1997;

(ii)

on the premise of recovering the exercise of

sovereignty, to preserve Hong Kong's prosperity and stability.

For China, prosperity was a sizeable cherry on the cake but never an alternative to the resumption of the exercise of sovereignty.

CONFIDENTIAL

/ Faced