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B
C
ດ
Annex sets them out in tabular form.
The Governor has also
sent a first draft of this speech: a revised version should
reach us on 10 September.
4.
The Governor's conclusions are broadly as foreshadowed in his discussions with the Secretary of State in Hong Kong in
July. During the past weeks our exchanges with Hong Kong have
centred on three difficult aspects of the 1995 LegCo electoral
package (not covered in detail in the draft minute, but of
which the Secretary of State may wish to be aware):
(a) Directly-elected seats. We are committed to putting to
the Chinese the case for a faster pace of democratisation than envisaged in the Basic Law (20 directly-elected seats up to
1999: at present there are 18). The Governor does not wish
us to proceed unilaterally to increase the number of seats in
the face of Chinese opposition and he has already hinted to
Chinese officials that he will not wish to go beyond the Basic Law provisions. On tactics he was initially inclined to
recommend that the Secretary of State should tell Qian Qichen
on 25 September that we wished to see 30 LegCo members
directly elected in 1995 (the old OMELCO consensus) and that
in his LegCo speech he should refer to this proposal but somewhat distance himself from it, then setting out his own
proposals for enhancing democracy within the constraints of
the Basic Law. We expressed reservations about this approach
(FCO telno 1329 attached), and the Governor now accepts that it is better not to be specific about what increase we would ideally like to see in the number of directly-elected seats.
This may improve the prospects for the Chinese engaging in calm discussion of the other proposals.
(b) Functional constituencies. The Basic Law provides for 30
LegCo members to be elected by functional constituencies (at
present 21 are). In order to improve their democratic
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