Perhaps I should hide behind total anonymity. It’s safer in the dark nerd cyber nether-world after all and facilitates more trenchant sniping.

I gave them a copy of my book GAMES HONG KONG PEOPLE PLAY thinking they would read it and comment on it. They sent someone called Monica Gwee to interview me.

Lo and behold the next Sunday there were two whole pages of verbatim excerpts and next to nothing from them.

I was grateful of course – but why bother being interviewed by them? Just send them what you want to have printed.

I’m sure Government House does it all the time.

Some things not mentioned in the Post’s CY story:

1 Nobody seriously thought at the time that the Observers were subversive. They were a middle class chat group. The fact that they appeared as number 2 on the SCOPG list just shows that the list was not compiled in order of importance. I remember a senior civil servant at the time complaining that no mid-levels dinner party was complete without an Observer on the guest list, demonstrating that the hostess was politically alert, open-minded, and willing to mix with the sort of Chinese people who could be trusted not to stand on the toilet seat. The Observers’position papers, which were long, very serious and rather boring, were actually published in the SCMPost, which then regarded itself as the Establishment’s newwspaper.
2. The Post dismissed the SCOPG report as a matter of little importance at the time, possibly because it was badly beaten to the story by the HK Standard.