DATELINE: HONG KONG

Post employees learned with less than relish that the room was for Feng Xiliang, one of mainland China's best known English language journalists. Mr. Feng, 75, was to be employed as a consultant. A founding editor of the official China Daily, he was known to have excellent connections with China's ruling elite. Although he had lived in the United States in recent years, he was still a member of one of the most senior organs of the Beijing government, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

There was a time when the South China Morning Post was the pillar of the British establishment in Hong Kong. But times have changed as the Empire is eclipsed by Chinese economic power. Rupert Murdoch divested himself of the information rich Post and its Western intellectual baggage to concentrate on the entertainment oriented Star [satellite] Television as it sought to harvest the rapidly growing China advertising market. News man Murdoch sold out to a Malaysian based Chinese businessman, Robert Kuok; a taipan said to be the second biggest of all foreign investors in China.

But such investments can make media proprietors particularly vulnerable to political pressure.Self made Hong Kong multi millionaire, Jimmy Lai, was forced to divest himself of his shares in the clothing chain he founded, Giordano, after his newspapers said rude things about the Chinese Premier, Li Peng. Mr. Kuok would have much more to lose than the comparatively diminutive Mr Lai, if one his minor subsidiaries offended a Chinese government willing to wreak commercial retaliation against foreign critics.

Fears that the Post subsequently went soft on China have been difficult to substantiate. Nevertheless, by 1997, aides to the outgoing Governor, Chris Patten, were claiming that the Post had gone over to "the enemy camp". One aide quipped that the only time that Patten had got a sympathetic press from the Post this year was after some unknown person had tried to poison one of his terriers. The dog survived. Soon afterwards, Patten was again relegated to the back pages.

Enter Mr. Feng.

"I am working there as a consultant to strengthen links with China. I act only as an advisor to give an opinion to the editor and management," he said.

Would he be looking at articles written by Post journalists before they were printed?

"I have no role in day to day things such as reporting. I am not intending to comment on work unless I am asked to. I am going to be more involved in setting up links."

Mr Feng's former colleagues spoke highly of him. He was genuinely liked. A China scholar who met him in 1963, when Feng was an editor of the Peking Review, described him thusly: "He was a very dapper (the word fits very well) man of great charm who to my youthful eyes appeared to be more of a language and journalism [specialist] than hard-core agitprop type. He dressed as sharp as one could get away with those days and had slicked-down hair and more often than not the touch of a smile instead of the grim revolutionary look. His English was excellent."

More recently, Mr Feng was described as a Chinese liberal who was said to have become somewhat disillusioned after the Tiananmen Square massacre. By that time, he had already attended a number of journalism conferences at the American East West Centre and aquired a taste for life in Hawaii. He left China to become a Mass Media Fellow at the Centre in 1991. "He's one of the good guys," a former Centre colleague said effusively.

But a liberal in China is something else again the West; in Mr Feng's case a person who has served on the national propaganda committee, a key part of the top communist party establishment which enforces directives that Chinese journalists toe the party line. Even in effective retirement, he was made a member of the People's Consultative Committee, a repository for old and trusted senior cadres.

When questioned about this, Mr Feng said his role at the Consultatitve Committee would finish this year. He was distressed by the negative reaction to his appointment at the Post.

"They are calling me a censor. I am not. I don't have the power. It is in the hands of the editor and the proprietor to manage editorial policy."

Mr. Feng had served as a editorial consultant in Hong Kong before. He had worked for the pro-Beijing magazine, Windows, which folded after its proprietor failed to become a contender for the Chinese appointed postion of Special Adminstrative Region Chief Executive.

"They don't need more people to strengthen their hands," Mr Feng said of his new employers.

"I have no power. There's so much talk. I begin to wonder why I am doing it," he said.

A former China Daily journalist thought he had the answer to that question. Mr Feng would be able to provide invaluable insights for the Post as it prepared to cover the forthcoming People's Congress meeting.

Would this result in better coverage?

Not necessarily, he told me.

Would Mr Feng's appointment be a form of insurance for the Post, I persisted.

More like a gamble, was the reply.

Alan Knight