TNAG-2717-FCO40-3923-House-of-Commons-Select-Committee-on-Foreign-Affairs-enquiry-1993 — Page 42

borders.

But generally speaking, there is not a long tradition in China of aggressive intentions outside: it has been rather more a negative sitting in the centre and letting people come to China except on the borders where they have sometimes been a little aggressive.

Question: There is of course a point on that which is that, if for example in Taiwan the opposition.. were to win the election and declared that Taiwan was independent from China, do you feel that there might then be the possibility of a Chinese aggression, you might call it, of China invading Taiwan?

Sir Alan Donald: If that had happened forty years ago, or thirty years ago, that might have been a risk. But any responsible Chinese Government would think very carefully about military action of any kind against Taiwan at the moment. All the signs are of growing and increasing links between Taiwan and China. And indeed, the difference between the Hong Kong situation and the Taiwan situation is that, for China, the recovery of Hong Kong is to restore national pride but the quarrel with Taiwan, if there is a quarrel, is unfinished business from the civil war between Chinese, which can be settled in a Chinese Way.

Chairman:

Let me ask Sir Richard if he could comment

on some of these issues as well.

-

First

Sir Richard Evans: I have two or three points. of all, the question to what extent is China still a socialist country interpreting that term in the Marxist sense what is left of socialism, now that agricultural collectivisation has been dismantled, now that price control has been dismantled, and now that, thanks to Deng Xiaoping two years ago, planning is being dismantled? I would say just two elements. One is a large state owned sector in industry and secondly an equalising incomes policy, a rather drastically equalising incomes policy: that is about all that is left in socialism with Chinese characteristics as it is now defined.

Secondly, about the Chinese Communist Party. Of course, it has had a very turbulent, complicated, tortuous history. There

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