Overshadowed by Beijing
By Doreen Weisenhaus Posted Apr 1 2005
EPA photo/Paul Hilton
Thousands attended a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong to remember China’s Tiananmen Square massacre. The residents of this former British colony show a rising confidence in their freedoms, including freedoms of speech and of the press.
On Jan. 17, Zhao Ziyang, the former Chinese Communist Party chief purged from power and under house arrest since 1989 for sympathizing with student protesters in Tiananmen Square, died at age 85 in a Beijing hospital.
The next morning, Hong Kong’s famously feisty newspapers splashed the news in banner headlines across their front pages. “Zhao Ziyang Got His Freedom,” announced Ming Pao, a leading Chinese-language newspaper. “Communist Party Owes Him Justice,” declared Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper that devoted 10 more pages inside.
Back in Beijing, however, state television and radio were prohibited from airing news reports about Zhao’s death. People’s Daily, the party newspaper, buried a one-line item with no mention of Zhao’s Tiananmen involvement.
The stark contrast in Hong Kong and mainland coverage demonstrated once again that Hong Kong remains the only city in the People’s Republic of China with a mostly unfettered press. For a city of less than seven million people, it also has more than a dozen daily newspapers, hundreds of magazines and six broadcasting outlets with news departments.
“We still have a free and robust press in Hong Kong since the handover,” says Chris Yeung, a political columnist for the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper, referring to the former British colony’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
Yeung is right. Since 1997, there have been no new laws restricting the press, no media organization closed down for political reasons and no instance of blatant political pressure to stop particular stories. “If there has been undermining of a free press, we haven’t seen it,” he says.
Then why does a persistent concern exist both within and beyond Hong Kong over its press freedom? It is because disturbing signs and signals have emerged in the big shadow that the mainland casts over life in Hong Kong, despite the “one country, two systems” principle embedded in the handover agreement that governs relations between the mainland and Hong Kong.
Last year, for example, several radio talk show hosts abruptly left the air in the run-up to legislative elections after claiming they had received threats from mainland sources. This was after Beijing ordered Hong Kong to abandon its pursuit of universal suffrage for elections in 2007 and 2008, even though the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, provides for that possibility. Only half of the current legislature is popularly elected. The other half is comprised of people representing narrow business interests who often have close ties to the mainland.
Two years ago, the local Hong Kong government tried unsuccessfully to pass unusually harsh national security laws mostly aimed at serving mainland interests and which would have had far-reaching consequences for local journalists.
More recently in January, after the death of Zhao, the former premier who until his downfall was in line to become China’s top leader, a mainland spokesman told pro-democracy legislators in Hong Kong that it would be unconstitutional for them to observe a minute’s silence in the legislative chambers. They did so anyway and pro-Beijing legislators stormed out, prompting an unprecedented cancellation of proceedings.
It is widely observed here in Hong Kong that the local government, headed by Tung Chee-hwa, a former businessman born in Shanghai, has no appetite to defy the Central Government that approved his appointment and neither would a likely successor. Many believe that Beijing was behind the Tung government’s efforts to push through the harsh national security legislation, known collectively as Article 23, for the provision in the Basic Law that required Hong Kong to have laws on treason, secession, sedition, theft of state secrets and subversion. The widely criticized proposals were shelved in 2003 after more than 500,000 people, including many journalists, marched in protest. The government has said that at some future date it will reintroduce the Article 23 legislation, but for now the issue has faded from public view.
Even without Beijing at its elbow, the Hong Kong government has engaged in actions journalists here regard as troubling. Last July, members of an anti-corruption agency raided seven of Hong Kong’s biggest newsrooms and a reporter’s home and seized some journalistic materials in an attempt to uncover reporters’ sources. The raids were prompted after newspapers disclosed the name of someone in a witness protection program – stories that might have violated the law. While this was not the first time the agency, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, executed search warrants of a newsroom, it was the largest single operation.
A Hong Kong court overturned the search warrants, ruling that the ICAC was “wrong in fact and law” in conducting the raids without first asking journalists to produce the information. An appeals court dismissed the government’s appeal, saying that only Hong Kong’s highest court had jurisdiction, but issued an opinion anyway that it would have upheld the warrants. The ICAC declined to pursue the case further, letting stand the appeals court’s unofficial approval of such journalistic raids.
As a result, the media fear that the ICAC might be emboldened to conduct more raids, says Mak Yin-ting, honorary secretary of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, which has asked the legislative council to bolster protections in the search and seizure of journalistic materials.
In another worrisome move, a government think tank released two controversial proposals in December to implement new controls over the media and their paparazzi that, if approved, would give Hong Kong stricter privacy laws than any other common law jurisdiction, including the U.K., U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
One proposal would establish a statutory press commission to oversee all print media, which would be bound by a press privacy code. Any publication deemed by the commission to have violated the code would be required to publish corrections and other findings or face court sanctions. A voluntary press council already exists in Hong Kong. It was established in 2000 in response to public concerns at the time over tabloid excesses, but its membership does not include the city’s three largest newspapers. The second proposal would legislatively create a right to privacy and provide new civil torts for media intrusion and publication of private facts.
Journalists already face legal difficulties in reporting. Although Hong Kong has one of the freest presses in Asia, it has reporting limitations for court cases, tough libel laws, an official secrets ordinance and restrictions against revealing certain details of criminal investigations and indecent or obscene material. And, unlike other common law jurisdictions, Hong Kong has no freedom of information law or a full democracy to look after press freedoms. The think tank’s proposals are currently under review by government officials.
But perhaps the biggest threat to press freedom emanates from the media themselves. As more Hong Kong media proprietors expand their enterprises onto the mainland, economic interests have caused some erosion of coverage. A survey I conducted in 2003 of more than 400 journalists in 25 Hong Kong newsrooms found nearly one-third who said they had received signals or instructions from their bosses to avoid newsworthy stories.
For those who had received these signals, most were linked to a negative report on a large corporate interest, a particular political party or politician or the Chinese government. More significantly, one-third also said they had softened the tone or changed the angle of a news story on behalf of interests of their news organization and one in 10 did so at least 20 times in the previous year.
Media insiders such as Yeung, the political columnist, say the pressure is on pro-democracy media to move closer to the political center and to de-emphasize political developments, particularly about the mainland. One newspaper, Apple Daily, found that as it persisted in its pro-democracy stances its advertisements began to disappear. That was a lesson not lost on its competitors. In its annual reports, the HKJA has noted that newspapers previously more supportive of pro-democracy views were gradually offering more favorable Beijing coverage and neutral news articles or not covering certain sensitive stories at all.
“Some controversies on the leadership of the Central Government have disappeared from newspapers,” says Mak of the HKJA. “There are seldom articles on power struggles.”
The January coverage of Zhao’s death and funeral was a striking exception to what many regard as a troubling trend toward trying to avoid offending Beijing. But the Zhao coverage can be evidence of the vital role imagined for Hong Kong media when the “one country, two systems” concept was developed.
Over the years, both on the mainland and in Hong Kong, Zhao had remained a symbol of a challenge to the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen. Sixteen years later, Hong Kong journalists flocked to Beijing and found themselves followed everywhere by public security officers. Meanwhile, mainland researchers were sent to Hong Kong to study how the media were reporting the news and to assess whether stories about local mourners could trigger unrest back on the mainland.
Earlier in January, just before the Zhao story began unfolding, a survey of more than 1,000 Hong Kongers showed a rising confidence to near record levels since the handover in their freedoms, including freedom of the press and speech. The professionalism and independence of much of the Hong Kong coverage of the Zhao saga that came in the wake of the survey seemed to echo the public’s confidence in its media, at least for now.