DATELINE: HONG KONG
Freedom of speech "ought" to continue
in Hong Kong: Governor Patten.
"It seems to me that it is no accident that a place has the largest number of newspapers and the highest readership levels per head of population is also the world's most open economy and one of the most stable societies. Market freedom and media freedom go together. Free markets need prompt access to reliable information if they are to function. The need public scrutiny to keep them healthy. So too do governments. As Justice Sutherland observed in 1935, 'A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to be fettered ourselves.' Furthermore, the sharing of information and ideas through the news and lively discussion through radio and television debates or editorial columns, all help to meld a community together.
"The question that is constantly being put to me is will this free press, and the free society that it describes and invigorates, survive the transfer of sovereignty on June 30 this year?
"Well it ought to survive, ought to survive because the Joint Declaration - the solemn treaty between Britain and China signed in 1984 and lodged with the United nations - and the Basic law - the constitution that will apply to Hong Kong after June 1997 - both stipulate that freedom the press will continue.
"It ought to survive, ought to survive because the story of Hong Kong after 1997, the story of this extraordinary construct of Chinese people and Western law, of Scots and Indian people, of Shanghainese and Cantonese entrepeneurs and newspaper proprietors, this model for Asia of what the future might be like, the story of when this city steps out of the old clothes of colonial rule and puts on the new garb of a special administrative region of China will be a more imporatant , more interesting story than anything that has happened here before.
"Whether the government of the People's republic of China will allow the people of Hong Kong to be masters in their own house, to continue to exercise the freedoms that have made this place so sucessful, have given in the ability to contribute so much to others, that is a queation that others will have to answer. It will determine the way China is regarded by the world, and by Hong Kong, and it will determine how far the hopes and possibilities that Hong Kong has created are given reality in the next decade.