have not yet converted their subscription payment method to Autopay will receive notice that their Membership Subscription Fee will be surcharged as agreed, unless they change immediately to the Autopay system. Please take urgent steps to change your payment method if you have still not done so!
The Sir Lindsay and Lady Ride Memorial Fund
I am extremely glad to be able to inform you that the three years of work to set up the Sir Lindsay and Lady Ride Memorial Fund has at long last been finalised. Jason Wordie and Robert Nield will be saying a good deal more about this. In brief, in December of last year the Fund was formally established, and it now has in it over half a million dollars. The first book for consideration for publication under the Fund is currently being given a careful read-over by Hong Kong University Press to see if it is suitable. It is my very real hope that, by this time next year, the first book in our Hong Kong Studies series will have been published. In the near future I shall be writing to all the local Universities and others to urge people with suitable books to submit them to us for consideration for publication. Any book written in English; on Hong Kong, its history or society, or on South China generally, which has not been able to be published because of financial constraints, will be considered. The Hong Kong University Press will publish any such book on our behalf, so long as it considers it to be academically of a sufficiently high quality. Members, if they have books which might be suitable, should consider sending them to us for consideration. I must, however, warn that, in practice, it is unlikely that the Society will be able to process more than two, or at the very best three, books a year, and, if we get very large numbers of books submitted, some of them may have to wait for some years before we can process them!
Lecture and Visit Programme
This year we have enjoyed another wide-ranging and interesting programme of lectures and visits. During the year we had 15 lectures, 4 visits to places within Hong Kong and 4 to places outside Hong Kong. Three of the lectures were associated with visits which took place shortly afterwards. Nonetheless, despite the range and interest of the programme, the number of this year's events shows a slight falling off
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