TNAG-1745-FCO40-2464-Visits-by-FCO-officials-to-Hong-Kong--including-visit-by-Lor-1988 — Page 27

CONFIDENTIAL

and Politluro

would

L

(e)

impressively orchestrated. The remark of one official that "the time was past when big powers could settle matters over the heads of the small countries", with reference to the forthcoming Sino-Soviet meeting on Cambodia, struck me as particularly naive. I suspect that the real foreign policy decisions are not in any case taken in the MFA but in the CPV Central Committee Secretariat the workings of which remain fairly impenetrable;

General Reflections

(paragraphs 4-6 and 21 and 22)

·

I was not convinced by my first exposure to Asian communism. The ideological underpinning of this regime is threadbare (where else in the communist world is membership of the COMINTERN still mentioned, let alone praised?) and would not survive even a moderate gust of glasnost. But this regime, like Burma's, will ultimately be judged by what it manages to do for its population's economic, not ideological, wellbeing. However on this count too the future is decidedly unpromising unless Vietnam finds a way of re-joining the human race and participating in the extraordinary prosperity which is developing elsewhere in the Asia/Pacific region. An index of this progression will be the way that Ho Chi Minh is presented in the future. I expect his role as father and reunifier of the nation to come integy to the fore and the associated Communist claptrap to be progressively abandoned.

DH Colvin

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