HKC. 040/1
RECEIVED IN REGISTRY
1993
DESK OFFICER
INDEX
PA
REGISTRY Action Taken
Governot
ONFIDENTIAL
ра
Annual Border Liaison Review
18 January 1993
Boundaries ek. D
(92: 040/1)
PAO (C) 2/1476/02 done
1.
Copy the Davies, FED The Whe, RAD
гм z M Mom's
凶
The Burki
Mr Marshall
Zen
1.
-
·
The Annual Border Liaison Review was held in Dongguan on 18 January. Dongguan is between Shenzhen and Canton. It is
the home county (now municipality) of my Guangdong opposite number, Mr Huang Qun, the Director of the provincial Foreign
Affairs Office. He is friendly, cautious and dull. His
municipality is friendly and at the wilder end of the West.
7,000 of the province's 25,000 foreign enterprises are located
there. Virtually every mountain all made of red earth is being flattened. The municipality is one big building site.
The peasants are turning their villages into industrial share
companies or realty estates. Vegetables are still produced but not much rice any more. In one township we visited, Changan, there are now 70,000 imported workers compared with 30,000
locals. Industrial wages are the equivalent of about HK$500 a month the same as Li Peng gets but under one tenth of wages in Hong Kong. New 4-bedroom houses, set in gardens, go for about HK$1 million. Here they would be five times that amount,
but there they are already double what they were 18 months
ago. Guangdong is fast heading to become the workshop of the world. Economically, for them and us, that is marvellous. Ecologically, they will eventually have a nightmare on their
hands.
2.
free.
Guangdong clearly intended the meeting to be trouble
I suspect they wanted to make a deliberate political statement to Peking, about whom outside the meeting
www
they
CONFIDENTIAL
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.