CONFIDENTIAL
ever);
LegCo getting cold feet and reluctant to take responsibility; no airport, big projects or contracts or
franchises agreed. But what would be new about that? We have been getting no cooperation from China for the last 18 months.
6.
If we broke now the advantages would be: we could get the row behind us and with luck develop a modus vivendi by the end of 1993; LegCo would amend the proposals in ways China might find difficult to object to. The weakness would be that the
row would not be over swiftly. LegCo could drag on
indefinitely with no way for us to expedite. The Governor said he considered the down-sides and up-sides of every course
of action available to us to be pretty evenly balanced. The simple question was is Hong Kong a value free zone? If it is we could do what China wants though this would make Hong Kong another U-turn issue, and there would be international obloquy, liberal hostility and no one else to depend on in LegCo, making Hong Kong more difficult to manage for the next 4 years. If Hong Kong was not value free we should take the course which seems nearer to being right; ie not giving China everything it wants on talks and, if talks take place, not giving China a rigged LegCo.
7.
There was discussion of how we could re-enter talks with
China and what time pressures we were under. The Governor
confirmed that he would feel under pressure to make an announcement in the week beginning 19 April either that talks were to take place or that the legislation would be introduced into LegCo. It was agreed we should avoid revisiting the formula which wrecked the last talks about talks. It should be possible, if China wanted talks, to find an acceptable
alternative form of words. The Governor was clear that
Chinese insistence on their wording had been intended to demonstrate that the basis of these talks was different from
before. We could not agree to that. It was agreed that the
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JEB
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