Mi Recketts
CONFIDENTIAL
producing an index of the key Ministerial exchanges, and a summary of our main exchanges with the Chinese during the period of the drafting of the Basic Law. These tools should help to compensate for the high turnover rate of staff in the operational departments and the consequent gaps in collective memory.
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PF Ricketts
1. We face a real problem in keeping track of a negotiating history on Hong Kong which now stretches back over almost 10 years. Inevitably there is no single individual with a direct and uninterrupted knowledge of all the exchanges with the Chinese. We have to rely on an institutional memory. There has long been work under way to ensure that this institutional memory is complete, but the resources available to us for research on the archives are limited. We have tended to look to the Hong Kong Government, where far greater manpower can be devoted to work in this area. But in this particular case both the formal information retrieval systems (in Hong Kong, London and Peking) and the personal recollection of a number of those involved in 1990 all failed.
2.
As Mr Ricketts notes, this tends to reinforce our belief that our exchanges with the Chinese in 1990 did not constitute any sort of agreement on 1995 electoral issues. There is no suggestion on the files that at the time we thought agreement had been reached. And there is clear circumstantial evidence that the Chinese did not do so either.
3. I have discussed with Mr Ricketts the work which is now under way in Hong Kong and in RAD to fill any possible lacunae in the collective memory. I think this is the best we can do to ensure that the stable door is well and truly bolted.
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CO Hum
4 November 1992
CONFIDENTIAL
elect.arrang.GEN.bern
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