TNAG-1625-FCO40-2239-Relations-between-Hong-Kong-and-China-1987 — Page 87

CONFIDENTIAL

The Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Howe, QC, MP Secretary of State for Foreign and

Commonwealth Affairs

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

London

SW1A 2AH

BRITISH EMBASSY

PEKING

26 October 1987

Sir

CHINA'S FOREIGN POLICY

"By persisting in reform and the open policy, as well as the independent foreign policy of peace, China will develop faster and contribute more to mankind". (Speech to the United Nations General Assembly by the Chinese Foreign Minister, State Councillor Wu Xueqian, on 23 September, 1987.)

1. In this despatch, I offer a survey of Chinese foreign policy. In doing this, I consider in turn the sentiments and attitudes which lie behind policy-making, the principles which the Chinese have said govern policy and the principal fields in which Chinese policy is now active.

The Determinants of Policy

2.

They

The sentiments and attitudes which lie behind China's behaviour towards the rest of the world owe a great deal to China's modern historical experience. This experience has. been painful. The Chinese have not forgotten, and will not for a long time forget, the way in which the powers of Europe, later joined. by Japan and the United States, imposed a series of what they consider to be unequal treaties upon Imperial China after defeating Chinese arms. will long remember that the Opium War took place because China refused to import opium shipped from Bengal by the British East India Company and a swarm of "country traders"; that Lord Elgin ordered the systematic destruction of the old Summer Palace in Peking after he had occupied the city in 1860; and that the relief of the foreign legations after their siege by the Boxers in 1900 was followed by the looting of the Winter Palace (the Forbidden. City) and the new Summer Palace in Peking. The most recent Chinese memory is of the unprovoked Japanese attack on China in the late summer of 1937, which was followed by the Japanese Occupation of most of China's major cities and the death of many millions of Chinese civilians.

CONFIDENTIAL