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AFT B
New
Para.
New
I enclose a copy of the statement which Douglas Hurd made in the
House of Commons on 20 December setting out the reasons why we have
decided to give British citizenship to a limited number of people
from Hong Kong.
Our last major responsibility of empire is to secure the best
possible future for Hong Kong. We have a clear duty to maintain good government and prosperity in Hong Kong up to 1997 and, we hope,
beyond. This is a matter of honour for Britain.
Para 2 in
New Paras
3+4
It is also in our interest to keep Hong Kong prosperous. Many jobs in this country depend upon it Britain's total trade with the territory amounts to over £4 billion a year. Our investments there exceed £2 billion and may indeed be considerably more than that if equity investment, banking interests and so on are included. 1,000 British companies operate in Hong Kong.
About
Last June's tragic events in Tiananmen Square caused shock waves in Hong Kong. Both the territory's prosperity and its good government are being put at risk by the emigration from the territory of its most talented and highly qualified people. Both the private and public sectors are affected. Experienced managers, engineers, doctors, nurses and teachers from Hong Kong find that their skills are in demand in countries like Canada and Australia.
The great
ma ry of these professionals would rather stay in Hong Kong.
They
re almost all ethnic Chinese and their families and careers
are in the territory. But they also want the assurance which possession of foreign citizenship and foreign passport give the assurance that if necessary they could leave Hong Kong quickly and be admitted to a different country. Ideally, they would like some means of obtaining a foreign passport while they continued to live and work in Hong Kong, but at present they can normally only qualify for foreign citizenship and a foreign passport by actually leaving the territory to make a new life overseas.
The Government is proposing to grant British citizenship to a limited number of key people without them ever having to come to
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