41 MON
CONFIDENTIAL
His
Excellency
Sir Edward Youde GCMG MBE
Govenor and Commander-in-Chief HONG KONG
FILE
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
1 August 1985
HKK 040/37
UG 1980
My dear Governer.
HONG KONG: A CHANGE OF DESTINY
1.
A
Thank you for your despatch of 3 July on the future of Hong Kong.
It is an important and significant despatch. We have arranged for it to be given a wide distribution in Whitehall
to posts overseas.
I know that Ministers will want to study it over the summer break.
2.
The issue of the governorship: it is
an d
future has hitherto dominated your particularly valuable to have a comprehensive account giving a Hong Kong perspective on the negotiations and
your thoughts on the way ahead at the beginning of the 12 year period leading up to the transfer of sovereignty.
3.
We agree closely with your account of Britain's historical responsibility to Hong Kong, which grew more in tense after the British return in 1945 and as Hong Kong and the Mainland grew apart after the creation of the People's Republic in 1949. We also agree generally with your account of the negotiations with the Chinese. Even if, in my own view, it was not the most productive way to begin the negotiations, it was right and in any case inevitable that we should press at first for continued British administration. But the September crisis showed that ultimately, for the Chinese, reunification was always more important than preservation of a prosperous Hong Kong, as indeed you recognise in paragraphs 7 and 19 of the despatch.
4
•
You refer in your account of the negotiations to the Chinese proposal for the creation of the Joint Liaison Group and the concern this proposal caused in Hong Kong.
This concern is well
understood here, even
if we tend to think that we shall ourselves in the end need a Joint Liaison Group as much as the Chinese
do.
The terms of Annex 11 and the reasonably satisfactory outcome of the
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