5 APR 1988
8 APR 1988
83
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ROZACR
# 12
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4
FROM: CO Hume
7
Bepar
Mr McLaren Minite
PS/Lord Glenarthur
Private Secretary
Hong Kong Department
DATE: 31 March 1988
HURB OIPATE:
Mr Gillmore
Mr Fifoot, Legal Advisers
Mr Cooper, FED
THE DEVELOPMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT IN HONG KONG: THE ROAD
TRAVELLED AND THE 1988 WHITE PAPER
A, B 1. I submit the Governor's two despatches of 1 March.
These
describe the development of representative government in Hong Kong
before last year's review, the review itself and the tasks which now
lie ahead.
A
The Road Travelled
-
an
2. The first despatch sketches in the historical background
instructive exercise. It is of particular interest to note that
immediately after the Second World War far-reaching ideas for
constitutional reform in Hong Kong were formulated by the then
Governor and endorsed by the Colonial Office but eventually shelved,
in large part because of the almost total lack of public support in
Hong Kong. The population and the Hong Kong Government had the
more immediate preoccupation of survival at a time of tumultuous
political and economic change in the region. Had local pressure for
more representative government built up that much earlier, our
negotiations with China in the 1980s could have been conducted
against a very different constitutional background in Hong Kong.
3.
--
-
It is also instructive to look back at the ideas floated in the
1984 Green Paper. In retrospect some of them look alarmingly
far-reaching, including as they did elections to ExCo and the
election of the Governor himself. It was perhaps not only the Chinese Government, as Sir D Wilson suggests, but also the British
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