APA(G)
CONFIDENTIAL
July
ECVIIS
2015
Mr Bonte Me ofs Mr Ricketts
W
John Ashton has for at least
3
years
of this to look forward to: GM 25/3
Our Telno 1333 recorded the meat of my conversation on
14 August with Yang Youyong of the NCNA (to discuss the meeting to be held in Guangzhou on 23 August on ECVIIS). Some of the gristle is also worth recording. Yang was at his most self-righteous, and made a few points which required strong
rebuttal.
2.
Firstly, Yang drew to our attention the Chinese MFA statement on 22 July setting out the Chinese position on ECVIIS. He gave special emphasis to the point, on which we had already questioned the NCNA several times, about the need for
HKG to take "active measures". I therefore asked Yang once
again what this meant. We were already taking all the measures
we could think of. If there were any other steps the Chinese side would like us to take we would be happy to consider them once we knew what they were. Yang replied that the formulation was part of China's long established and principled position. I pressed further on its relevance to the ECVIIS. Yang embarked on a long dissertation which in essence criticized HKG for its original policy of first asylum towards Vietnamese migrants, which he described as "the root of the problem". was our responsibility to ensure that the camps were empty by 1997, and that VM's posed no burden to the SARG.
It
3.
I said I found Yang's logic hard to follow. We were
not talking about VM's but about ECVIIS, whom everyone,
including the Chinese, agreed were an entirely separate
category. The MFA statement had been about ECVIIS, not VMS. Was Yang suggesting that when boats carrying ECVIIS arrived in Hong Kong waters we should turn them back onto the high seas? Yang would not give a direct answer (presumably because he is not programmed to make any statement which extrapolates from the explicit lines to take which he memories) and became
flustered.
he 34-1/2
CONFIDENTIAL
2993
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