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sovereignty approaches, it is reasonable that we should be discussing more and more issues with the Chinese. We need to avoid them being taken by surprise by significant policy proposals. At the least we want to prevent them frustrating, as they often can, policies which for the good of Hong Kong should stretch beyond 1997. At the best we want them genuinely to understand how Hong Kong works and thus ensure that they can continue to apply after 1997 one of the lessons which has allowed Hong Kong to flourish minimum interference from the metropolitan power, or indeed the local
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government. This means encouraging contact between our civil servants and Chinese officials. But all this increased contact and greater effort to explain what we are doing has to be achieved while still preserving the sort of autonomy which has enabled Hong Kong to flourish in the past and which the Joint Declaration was designed to preserve after 1997.
17. This process is not easy. The Chinese are deeply suspicious of British motives. They are mentally programmed to believe that, unless China takes steps to frustrate their aim, the British, and by extension, the Hong Kong Government (they find it impossible to make the correct distinction between the two), are determined to exploit the territory while they can and to denude it of its assets before British administration ends. Any substantial government contracts going to British firms are seen as proof of this theory, however scrupulously fair the Hong Kong Government is in the process of awarding them. Furthermore, the Chinese are also determined to see the ending of the British role in Hong Kong as a handing back of power to the central Chinese authorities who, in turn, will devolve it to a new Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. This is in marked contrast to our instinctive vision of a continuum of administration, with the assets and liabilities of the present Hong Kong Government passing to the new SAR and most of the civil service remaining in place despite the removal of the British Governor and some of the senior expatriates.
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On our side too we are not short of suspicions.
We have long memories of dealing with a system which, both pre and post Communist, is endemically suspicious of foreigners; depressingly bureaucratic; and prone to spasdmodic attempts at clumsy interference. On both sides there are historical reasons for these suspicions. They are
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