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14.
No
3
CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian has described China's aims to the Standing Committee of the al People's Congress as follows:
(i)
(ii)
to recover Hong Kong and resume the exercise of sovereignty over it no later than 1997;
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. Faced with a choice she would always have opted for national reunification at the expense of continued prosperity and never the reverse.
15.
The Chinese were not bound to negotiate with us. They could, as they sometimes reminded us, have decided to recover Hong Kong and resume the exercise of sovereignty over it by unilateral action. Why then did they decide to negotiate? There were, I think, three reasons. First, they judged that a negotiated recovery of Hong Kong would increase the chances in the long term of peaceful reunification with Taiwan. Secondly, they calculated that a negotiated recovery was far more likely to ensure the territory's continued prosperity (and with it China's very sizeable foreign exchange earnings from Hong Kong). Thirdly, they wanted to build up the international reputation of China as a country which favoured the negotiated settlement of territorial problems.
16. But the commitment to negotiate, even if it became stronger over time, was never absolute. There were fruits which a negotiation would have to yield: a commitment by us to "restore" Hong Kong; and, once this seemed attainable, a commitment by us to consult the Chinese within a formal framework and from an early date about the smooth transfer of government. Without these fruits, unilateral action (by which I mean in the first instance the public declaration by China of her policies in relation to Hong Kong) would have been preferred.
Shape of the Negotiation
17.
The shape of the process of discussion and negotiation was determined by several factors, political and technical. One of the political factors was the attitude of the Chinese towards the participation of Hong Kong. There were two related elements in this: that Hong Kong could not be a party to the process and that Hong Kong could not be represented by the British Government. What this attitude meant in practice was that the Governor and his Political Adviser had to be members of the British Government delegation; that no Hong Kong Chinese, official or unofficial. could be members of the delegation; and that we had to be extremely careful about the way in which we argued for the interests of Hong Kong. We could not say that this or that proposal was acceptable or unacceptable to the people of Hong Kong. We did not wish to say that it was or was not good for the British. Fortunately, the Joint Statement of September 1982 made it possible for us to say that a proposal was or was not likely to promote the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong.
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18.
At any rate until late on, another political factor was the deep suspicion of the Chinese of our purposes, creating a tendency on their part to misread the import of what we were proposing.
S
CONFIDENTIAL
Redacted under FOI
exemption 27(1)(a)(c)(d)
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