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to the pamphlet which appeared in the Chinese Press when the contents of the book were publicised in Britain.
Anthony Lawrence, the Foreign Correspondent of the BBC in Hong Kong had this to say in a Radio Hong Kong Television VIEWFCINT programme which was quoted in the Sunday Post Herald of
September 29th 1974:
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"These MPs tend to follow a well trodden path. They have their ideas about Hong Kong, and they come out for a fortnight's visit and find the evidence to fit these ideas. There are MFs with interests in banking and big business who find everything wonderful here; there are professional muckrakers who think that Hong Kong is some kind of ghastly Asian slum, stinking with prostitution, child labour, poverty, crime and disease. We had a bit of that in that egregious booklet "Hong Kong: A Case to answer. Whatever is the matter with Hong Kong we don't need that kind of effort; as a journalist one has to read so much of it half truths, rhetoric, omissions of key facts. It's the curse of modern public life rancid emotion with the rationalisation filled in afterwards, pretending, pretending, to look objective."
Introduction
Amid the text in heavy type and eye-catching boxes are facts and figures which are supposed to highlight Hong Kong's gravest deficiences. They are intended not only to be absorbed by the avid reader but, more important for the authors' purpose, to impress and influence the individual who might casually pick up the pamphlet and do no more than glance through its contents.
The figures of hospital beds in the few Territories has been mentioned earlier. In the next blacked-lined box the authors'· state, amongst other things, that there is a ban on all political parties and that there is no right of free assembly.
It was perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that on almost the same day the pamphlet was launched by Fr. James Sillars, MP, two leading local figures announced that they were proposing to form a third political party. The other two, the Civic Association and the Reform Club, have been in existance for many years, the Civic Association since Cctober 20th 1954 and the Reform Club since 1949.
Similarly unfortunate for the writers was the holding of a protest rally over inflation in Kowloon Park by a much publicised Lew-Left group of local persons, the Revoluntionary International League, on the Sunday after the pamphlet came out.
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