DATELINE: HONG KONG
Prospects for Press Freedom in Hong Kong: Kin-ming Liu, Vice Chair, Hong Kong Journalists Association
When London and Beijing signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration back in 1984 to seal the fate of Hong Kong, mainland China set out the "one country, two systems" formula which promised us a lot of good things, such as Hong Kong's current system will be kept "unchanged for 50 years" and "Hong Kong people will be running Hong Kong." It remains to be seen whether these nice promises will be implemented or not.
However, the signs have not been good. On July 1, Hong Kong's Legislative Council will be abolished. the Bill of Rights will be watered down. Beijing, a regime not well-known for respecting humanrights, democracy and liberty, will be firmly in control, with the help of the puppet government headed by C.H. Tung.
Don't get me wrong. We do not have a perfect democratic system to defend in Hong Kong. Far from it. Britain never granted us any drop of democracy until recently. Colonialism and democracy simply do not fit together. But Hong Kong has always enjoyed a high degree of freedom which is comparable to any other democracies on earth. A lot of these freedoms, I am afraid, will be curtailed after the takeover.
Hong Kong people are concerned about their future. We journalists in particular are very worried that press freedom will become one of the first casualities when Beijing marches in. I am going to tell you two major threats to press freedom as I envision will be haunting us after July 1. On is external and the other is internal.
The external one obviously is coming from mainland China, our future master. Several senior mainland Chinese officials told us a few things last year which I think were quite telling. When Lu Ping, the most senior Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong and Macau affairs, was interviewed by CNN last May and in other occasions, he laid down the theory of reporting and advocacy. Mr. Lu said we journalists in Hong Kong can continue to practise what we have been doing, namely objective reporting but we shall not advocate things like the independence of Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Tibet. These things, he argued, have nothing to do with freedom of expression and just will not be tolerated. It showed Beijing has no idea of what freedom of expression really is.
What Mr. Lu actually meant is: we cannot write anything Beijing does not like. Let's say, an editorial coming out an strongly supports the one-party dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party in mainland China, or strongly supports the great idea of Hong Kong rejoining its motherland. I think Beijing will love it. What won't be allowed is not advocacy per se but advocating things they don't like.
Qian Qichan, the Chinese foreign minister, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last October that we journalists shall not launch any personal attack on senior Chinese leaders. Well, I have twoquestions for Mr. Qian. First, what do you mean by "personal attack"? Second, who is to say whom senior, medium-ranking or junior officials are? All these are very arbitrary. Under the current system in Hong Kong, if we write anything inaccurate or unfair, people can take us to court and sue us for libel. This is more or less a fair game. However,it will be very different after July 1. Hong Kong has the rule of law. Mainland China has the rule of man, or if you like, the rule by law. They can pass any law in the morning, change it in the afternoon, abolish it in the evening, and reinstate the same thing the next morning. If I write an article criticizing one of the economic policies of Prime Minister Li Peng, will it be considered as a "personal attack"? Probably so after the takeover.
Let's now turn inward into the profession itself and you will find the second major threat to press freedom which, I would argue, is more serious than the first one. We have a very peculiar phenomenon called "self-censorship" which has been going on for many years now. A recent poll conducted by the Chinese University in Hong Kong said, one in five journalists have practised self-censorship and more than half believe press freedom will diminish after 1997. This phenomenon happens without any explicit pressure or threat from mainland China. Chief editors and senior management people in newsrooms act as censors for Beijing. They kill stories which are seen as offensive to mainland China and waterdown criticisms of the future master. Let me tell you a tiny example. No media in Hong Kong today will all what happened on June 4th, 1989 in Tiananmen Square a massacre anymore. They won't call a spade a spade.
Instead, they call it the Tiananmen "Incident" or June 4th "Incident", a more neutral term. According to the official version from Beijing, there was no masacre; not even one person was killed in the square. This is a very subtle process which is very difficult to tackle. No censor who does this dirty job for Beijing will be so foolish to admit that the reason to kill a story is he or she i afraid of mainland China or to please Beijing. They don't have to. Instead, a lot of "legitimate" reasons can be used.
Let me tell you my story. Last December I came to this part of the world to do a series of interviews with people like Liu Binyan, A.M.Rosenthal, Perry Link, William F. Bucley, Jr., Noam Chomky and others. Most of these interviews were never published. The ones on Liu Binyan, the well-known Chinese writer living in Princeton, and Mr. Rosenthal, the New York Times columnist who does not pull any punches whencriticizing the regime in Beijing, were the only two which got published. Then I submitted the third one to my editor. It was on Perry Link, a well-known China scholar at Princeton University who was denied entry to mainland China last summer and still not being allowed into the country. A week went by and the interview did not appear. I marched into the room of the chief editor and asked him why. He said that the interview would not be published because "there's no substance in your story," "readers are not interested in what you're writing," and"there's no news angle in it." He went further to say that had he known I was writing about A.M. Rosenthal, he would have never let t bepublished because "no one knows who A.M. Rosenthal is."
A few weeks after this confrontation, my column was cancelled all of a sudden. Before I quit my job at Sing Tao Daily last month, I used to write a column on international affairs. I always left what happenedin mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong for my colleagues at the China desk or the local desk to comment. But in my last several columns, I started to comment on Sino-U.S. relation. I of course reserved a lot of ammunitions for Beijing. What I actually did was telling the readers that the U.S. media had been paying a lot of attention to China lately.
I said The New Republic just had a cover story on China and one of thearticles said so and so. Or The Nation just ran a story on Fortune 500's lobbying in Washington, D.C. for mainland China. I did not spellout much of my own opinion but it has already proven to be too much for my editor to swallow.
If the trend of self-censorship continues at its current rate, Beijing will not have to lift a finger to crack us down after the takeover. Media owners in Hong Kong are businessmen first, second, and last. They care about only one thing: money. Most of them have heavy investments in mainland China and maintain very good relations with the leaders in Beijing. They would not rock the boat. I believe most of the frontline journalists do have the integrity to do their jobs, to report accurately and objectively. However, they cannot decide what gets published on the papers.
I certainly don't have any magic to solve this problem. We at the Hong Kong Journalists Association publish an annual report on freedom of expression in Hong Kong, along with London-based Article 19. We hope to keep the issue on the agenda and appeal to our colleagues to stand upagainst the censors. We have to let these censors know they have to pay a price in silencing us. We will publicize the cases and shame them. This is primarily a battle we journalists in Hong Kong have to fight ourselves. No one can do it for us. The new report should be out next week. We better do it fast and publish it before the takeover. Otherwise, we don't know whether we still can do so or not after July 1.
Facing the 1997 takeover crisis, it boils down to to options for us: get the hell out of there or stay on and defend our ways of life. We can either move to places like Canada or the U.S. and start enjoying the instant fruits of democracy which your ancestors fought for dearly, or we can stay home and start planting the seeds of democracy ourselves. Someone has to start to do it. Otherwise, we will never be able to enjoy the fruits of democracy at home. And I'm willing to be one of the "stupid" people to do so.
Press freedom is an important cornerstone of any free and democratic society. I am committed and determined to stay on and fight the uphill battle ahead. I have no excuse not to fight the battle. I don't have to look far to find aspirations and encouragements. Many brave people have been fighting for human dignity all over the world. Look at Nelson Mandela before he was elected as the president of SouthAfrica. Look at Aung Sang Suu Kyi in Burma. Or look at Wei Jinsheng in mainland China. They are willing to sacrifice their freedoms so thatone day their fellow countrymen may be able to enjoy the very thing they lost. Compared to countries like Nigeria where journalists are shot, Hong Kong is already a paradise. Thinking of these courageous figures and millions of nameless people who have demonstrated tremendous courage in saying no to tyrannies, I simply cannot abandon Hong Kong and run away.
8,000 journalists from all over the world will be in Hong Kong later this month to cover the big party. I just hope all of them will not just disappear and move onto another hot spot after they have found out there's no drastic change overnight. If they're looking bloody crackdown, they'll be very disappointed. In many ways, the Chinese takeover has started many years ago. The process is slow and subtle. Please continue to keep an eye on Hong Kong. Despite what Beijing says, they do pay attention to outside opinions, especially those coming fromthis country. We Chinese have a saying: "To beat a dog behind closed doors." You can certainly lend us a helping hand by preventing the door from being shut totally.