Dateline Hong Kong

Hong Kong's convergence with China could result in a head on collision over questions of freedom of speech. Since Hong Kong plays a critical and central role in Asian Pacific media and remains the most important window on greater China, any such collision can be expected to have global repercussions.

Hong Kong has served as base for China watchers for more than 150 years. Those sympathetic to Western interests have almost always been free to work here. Morrison of the Times passed this way to report on the Boxer uprising. Sun Yat Sen, the founder of modern China, took refuge under the Union Jack, as he prepared the arguments for a republican constitution. In more recent years, Hong Kong became a staging centre for coverage of the Vietnam war and a listening post on the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. It is currently the most important centre for Western foreign correspondents operating in eastern and southeast Asia, with more than six hundred foreign journalists based here. It is the regional headquarters for international wire services, weekly news magazines, television and radio media.

In the declining years of British colonial rule, restrictions imposed on local publishers became more relaxed, allowing the local Chinese reporters and editors many of the same freedoms enjoyed by their Western colleagues. A diversified and complex local media was permitted to flourish. By 1997, it included 59 daily newspapers, 675 periodicals, two commercial television companies, a subscription television service, a regional satellite television service, and two commercial radio stations. The government broadcaster, Radio Television Hong Kong, which began transmitting in 1928, operated seven radio channels in English and Cantonese. Its television service produced programs which were carried on both commercial television stations.

Freedom of the press in Hong Kong is enshrined in the Basic Law which provides the constitution for the new Special Administrative region. But questions remain about how those freedoms will be defined in practice. At one extreme, one has a freewheeling western style press, driven by the profit motive, obsessed with trivia and careless with the facts. At the other, one finds the hard-line media of the last great Stalinist state, directed by the Communist Party and nettled by Western criticisms of authoritarianism, choosing to ignore the rampant exploitation resulting from economic liberalisation.

In between fall many of the journalists concerned with questions of freedom of speech. They are to be found both in Hong Kong and on the mainland itself, reporting, as journalists do everywhere, what they identify as of interest and importance to their publics. This collection of reports on the Internet will seek to record journalists' views and opinions and where possible include documents pertinent to questions of freedom of speech. It aims to do so progressively during the year of transition, 1997.

Alan Knight, the Internet page editor has presented a Ph.D. thesis examining the work of Australian foreign correspondents in southeast Asia. While based in Hong Kong in 1993, his research on journalism took him to Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. A former Executive Producer at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he has been a journalist for more than two decades. He is currently a correspondent member of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club and a Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Asian Studies at Hong Kong University.