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needed to have a water-tight position on the case of those who
may be persecuted after 1997 (it was not enough to imply that if forced to leave Hong Kong they could go to China). The ethnic minorities was a comfortable excuse to criticise us
when LegCo lacked the courage to criticise China; but the
public did not care. On wives and widows a lot of credit
could be gained at little cost if the Home Office acted
flexibly.
Talks with China
5. The Governor had also discussed this briefly with the Secretary of State. His address to LegCo on 6 October was not
the deadline but he would have to say at least how we would
proceed if the talks succeeded and how if they did not. We
should in any case know where we are by the time the Secretary
of State met Qian Qichen in late September, and he thought the
Chinese probably believed that October was our deadline. But he wondered if any of the Chinese side had the clout to
recommend to the "Old Men" the sorts of concessions which we
would require to strike a deal.
6.
Sir John Coles suspected that it could only be done at a crunch point when the Chinese negotiators could argue that an acceptable package was in sight and was worth the extra effort
to obtain. The Governor wondered how much energy the Chinese
leadership could devote to this issue considering their
problems with the economy and the difficulty of maintaining the regime. He thought it prudent to consider how we might cope with the failure of the talks. A White Paper would be useful whether they succeeded or failed. If they failed it
would need to include:-
recordgov.29.MORRIS
JEB
Why we had not introduced democracy years ago;
A justification for our original approach;
How it fitted with the Joint Declaration and Basic Law;
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