Former Chinese official Xu Jiatun told the paper a group of business and community leaders including Austrian shipping tycoon Helmut Sohmen had asked him to put the idea to Beijing.

“They proposed a 10-year lease of Hong Kong after 1997 for them to practice self-rule. I was caught by surprise,” said the former director of Xinhua news agency’s Hong Kong branch. “They were all upper class elites.”

“I told him Beijing would not agree to their proposal. But I would report it to them,” he was quoted as saying. He added that 10 people signed the lease proposal.

Xu, who now lives in Los Angeles, said the tycoons had proposed to pay Beijing 10 billion Hong Kong dollars (US$1.3 billion) and the message was conveyed to the then Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin.

Xu said he had also compiled a report to the central authorities and for leader Deng Xiaoping, who died before the Hong Kong handover, as reference.

He said Jiang did not state his position but one senior mainland official Lu Ping had considered the proposal as an act of treason.

The proposal came after the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese troops killed hundreds, if not thousands of pro-democracy campaigners in Beijing on June 4, 1989. It had prompted a confidence crisis in Hong Kong about the city’s 1997 return to China.

Xu fled to the United States in 1990 amid accusations he sympathised with the Beijing students during the protests.

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