TNAG-2103-FCO40-2995-Future-of-Hong-Kong-exchanges-with-the-Chinese-on-the-Basic--1990 — Page 144

PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL

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I talked to Zhang at length and repeatedly about the political section of the Basic Law and the importance of increasing both numbers, and the non-numbers part of the package, so that the result could be commended to middle-of-the-road opinion in Hong Kong. I explained the very real dangers if the Basic Law was not improved from the version being proposed recently in Canton and the intolerable position in which such rigidity would place both me and HMG. Zhang tried hard to get from me an answer on whether increased numbers or removing the differential voting system was

I told him that both were. He was more important. pessimistic about further changes to the Basic Law. I told him that, if he was right, we faced a very gloomy prospect over the next few months with serious risk of a political crisis.

Zhang produced a number of views which he attributed to various groups or opinions he had heard in Hong Kong. They were very familiar and the "made in Hong Kong" label was unconvincing. They included subversion, dealt with as above, and

internationalisation on which, when I told him that I could not understand what the Chinese were getting at, he said that it was perhaps based on a misunderstanding due to Mrs Thatcher's speech at Kuala Lumpur. He probed at some length about possible political interest of the Americans, Japanese and others. I told him that a number of countries, particularly the United States and Japan, had major economic interests in Hong Kong. They also had a general interest in the 1984 agreement working successfully since the converse would be seriously disruptive to China's relations with this part of the world and more widely. Hong Kong was either an international centre of trade and finance helpful to China, or it was nothing more than a pimple on the face of China.

Also attributed to Hong Kong groups, unspecified, was the view that LegCo and OMELCO should not be involving themselves in Basic Law affairs: the Basic Law was a Chinese matter and OMELCO was part of the British Government apparatus. I tried to dissuade him of the myth that LegCo was a tool of the administration. While he was here he would have seen that legislators were refusing to vote funds for Vietnamese boat people

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