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Civil Servants
I had proposed to the Governor the first six names in my list, namely Anson Chan, Michael Leung, John Chan, Peter Lok, Billy Lam and Michael Sze. The Governor had commented "it would be sensible to target invitations at the generation who will be post-1997 leaders. In this category, I would suggest concentrating on John Chan, Billy Lam and Michael Sze of those on your list. Others you may wish to consider are Eddy Hui, Donald Tsang, Gordon Sui and Denise Yue." You will see that all of the latter were included in my nominations.
The Press
I had proposed to the Governor Margaret Ng (no longer Publisher of Ming Pao but still an important columnist), C K Ma, Cheung Kin Bor, Executive Chief Editor of Ming Pao, and Raymond Wong of TVB. On these the Governor had commented Margaret Ng now writes little and knows the UK well; CK Ma has limited English. I suggest Y P Cheng, the new Editor of Ming Pao and Sally Lin, Publisher of the Economic Journal as alternatives to your suggestions from those papers.
It may still be worth trying to identify up-and-coming journalistic talent in Hong Kong despite inevitably their being relatively young and inexperienced by UK standards. Possbile candidates would be Andy Ho (Political Editor, SCMP), Kevin Lau (Senior Reporter, HK Economic Journal), Irene Sung (News Editor, Sing Tao) and June Teng (Assistant News Editor, TVB). " As you will see we included these latter four candidates in the list. I dropped Margaret Ng, but kept C K Ma and included Sally Lin (mis-typed as Sally Liu in my letter) at the expense of George Shen who I had originally proposed from the same publication. Again there is a choice between the leading established figures and the up-and-coming with most of the former nominees originating from me and most of the latter originating from the Governor. Either way I suggest the choice can be justified.
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6. Putting any of these into an absolute order of priority is difficult. So is the choice between Category I and Category Almost all of these I suggest would rate the offer of a Category I visit but, as would often be the case, if they could not accept because of pressure of time then we could pick them up when they were making a visit under their own steam and give a Category II. If pressed to give an indication of over- all priority I would suggest starting with offers to John Chan, Billy Lam, Rosanna Tam and Steven Poon.
even
Yours
Peli
PW Heap
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