Media and Politics in Post-Handover Hong Kong

Joseph M. Chan, Francis L.F. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317968771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The world was watching Hong Kong as its sovereignty was returned to China in 1997. Many predicted that it was the doomsday of press freedom in the city.

Now, a decade after the handover, this book provides an up-to-date review of the dynamic relationship between media and political power in the post-handover years. It covers seven key issues including

• the mapping of the changing boundaries of press freedom,
• the impact of media ownership change on editorial stance,
• the development of national and hybrid identities,
• the tension between self-censorship and media professionalism,
• the rising importance of government public relations,
• the power and limits of hegemonic discourse, and
• the countervailing force posed by collective actions and public opinion.

These studies combine to reveal how the media are transformed as power structure is reconfigured and how the media may act upon politics in exerting their roles as the people's voice. The book will serve as a reference for anyone who is interested in the evolution of political communication in a transitional society.

Strategic Interaction, Cultural Co-orientation, and Press Freedom in Hong Kong

Francis L. F. Lee

Introduction

Although Hong Kong has never been an independent and democratic country, a confluence of social and historical conditions has generated a ‘tradition of press freedom’ in the city. As Hong Kong developed into a refugee society after the Second World War, the press was largely oriented towards Chinese politics. The media were allowed to criticize the Communist regime in the Mainland and the KMT regime in Taiwan insofar as they did not challenge the colonial authority (Lee, 2000).

The media shifted their major orientation towards local issues only in the late 1970s. But this development coincided with the beginning of the negotiation on sovereignty transfer. In the subsequent transition period (1984–1997), Hong Kong was marked by a dual power structure in which political power was relatively balanced between the British and Chinese forces. It resulted in an unprecedented level of freedom for the Hong Kong press to criticize both the Chinese and British/Hong Kong governments.

But with China destined to emerge as the sole power center, the media have also begun to adjust to the post-handover situation long before 1997. In the early 1990s, observers already identified problematic developments such as shifts in journalistic paradigms (Chan & Lee, 1991), media self-censorship (Lee, 1998), and infiltration of Chinese and pro-China capital into the media system (Fung & Lee, 1994). Without conspicuously and abruptly undermining press freedom, these processes gradually altered journalistic practices, the media landscape, and the boundaries of media discourse.

Then, how free has the Hong Kong press been after the handover? What have been the major challenges facing journalists and media organizations? How did the Hong Kong media struggle for their freedom? Was self-censorship widespread? And on what kinds of issues has self-censorship been particularly serious? What has been the relationship between press freedom and the process of re-nationalization?

This article discusses these questions and attempts to provide a conceptual account of the development of press freedom in Hong Kong. More specifically, it focuses on three processes which have shaped the post-handover development of press freedom in the city. The first process is the strategic interaction between the media and the power holders. While the Chinese government has employed various strategies to domesticate the Hong Kong media, different types of media responded to the political pressure in different ways. Second, reunification was followed by increased interactions between the Hong Kong media and the Chinese government, as well as between the Hong Kong society and the Mainland at large. The resulting process of cultural co-orientation has reduced conflicts between the Hong Kong media and China on a number of sensitive national issues. Lastly, political developments after 2003 have led to the re-emergence of national — local conflicts, which led to renewed concerns of press freedom. The following sections discuss the three processes in turn, while the concluding section summarizes and discusses the implications of the analysis.

Strategic Interactions in the Struggle for Press Freedom

Legally speaking, the Basic Law, the mini-constitution of the Special Administrative Region (SAR), acknowledges the need to maintain freedom of the press and expression in the city. Article 27 states that Hong Kong residents shall have ‘freedom of speech, of the press, and of publication’. However, the legal framework does not provide unequivocal protection for press freedom. Laws and provisions that can be used to suppress press freedom continued to exist. Article 23 of the Basic Law, in particular, states that the SAR government has to enact anti-secession laws on its own. Moreover, the National People’s Congress of China holds the right to interpret the Basic Law. As legal scholar Anne Cheung (2001) argues, ‘the Hong Kong press may never know the scope of its freedom’ under such a legal framework (p. 93).

Nevertheless, like its colonial predecessor, the Chinese and SAR governments have been reluctant to activate the legal minefield. Weakness in legal protection, hence, may not prevent the presence of at least a certain degree of press freedom, if by the latter we mean a situation in which government censorship and media self-censorship are relatively absent. This situation can be the result of the strategic interactions among actors with different concerns and interests. In fact, the handover marked the beginning of a new strategic game between the local media and the Chinese and SAR governments. Understanding this strategic game is crucial to our understanding of press freedom in Hong Kong.

Broadly speaking, China was motivated to demonstrate the feasibility of ‘one country, two systems’, especially to Taiwan. Hence it has largely refrained from openly and publicly intervening into Hong Kong affairs in the first few years after 1997.¹ There was no formal, pre-publication censorship system imposed in the city. Unlike in the Mainland, the SAR government does not have any power to remove top level editors or close down media outlets in Hong Kong.

It does not mean that the Chinese government did not attempt to control the Hong Kong media. Even before the handover, Chinese officials had already stated a ‘three nos’ policy for the Hong Kong media: no advocacy for Taiwan/Tibet independence, no engagement in subversive activities, and no personal attack on national leaders (Lee & Chu, 1998). This policy sets up the limits of acceptable press coverage. Yet noticeably, the three no-go areas are all concerned with national issues. The policy does not touch upon local matters at all. Again, the Chinese government did not want to be criticized for encroaching upon freedom in Hong Kong. Hence it turned to strategies aiming at inducing media self-censorship. It thus kick-started the strategic interaction between the media and the power holders. Three strategies adopted by the Chinese government are particularly noteworthy.

First, the Chinese government could influence the Hong Kong media through co-opting media owners, who may have various kinds of business interests in the Mainland (see Fung, this volume). The owners may not dictate daily news operation, but they can exercise influence through making basic allocative decisions, such as the use of resources and hiring of top level personnel. In fact, after the handover, concerns with press freedom were occasionally raised by the major personnel decisions of media organizations. Among the most prominent cases was South China Morning Post’s decision in November 2000 to relieve Willy Wo-lap Lam, a famous China-critic, from his role of director of the paper’s China coverage. Lam subsequently resigned. Another example was radio broadcaster Metro Finance’s decision to sack its managing editor Paul Cheung Chung-wah in August 2002. Cheung claimed that his sacking came after he was ordered to tone down reports on the then Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, the Falun Gong spiritual movement, and business tycoon and station owner Li Ka-shing (HKJA & Article 19, 2003). It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which these decisions were politically motivated. But as long as journalists take them as such, they signal what is and is not appropriate. In other words, these decisions could effectively set up norms for news coverage.

Norms of ‘political correctness’ were also set up by Chinese officials’ occasional comments on and criticisms towards the Hong Kong media. In 1999 and 2000, Chinese officials have more than once criticized the Hong Kong media’s handling of the pro-Taiwan-independence viewpoint. In October 2000, in response to a question from a Hong Kong journalist about the Central government’s attitude towards the Chief Executive election, then Chinese President Jiang Zemin infamously criticized the journalist and the Hong Kong media as ‘naive’. Then, in the wake of the July 1 demonstration in 2003, in which 500,000 citizens protested against national security legislation, Chinese officials pinpointed a number of Hong Kong media outlets as major mobilizers behind the demonstration.²

The Hong Kong media did not simply succumb to the political pressure. Instead, these occasions of overt criticisms from Chinese officials marked the times the Hong Kong media went directly and openly against the Chinese government by re-emphasizing the principle of press freedom and their understanding of journalistic professionalism (Lau & To, 2002). Yet the messages from the Chinese officials were sent out nonetheless. The Hong Kong media came to know what would irritate China.

Third, the Chinese government was also adept in employing ‘strategic ambiguity’ (Cheung, 2003) in inducing self-censorship, particularly by giving out warnings without defining the key terms. This strategy was evident even before the handover. In 1994, Ming Pao reporter Xi Yang was sentenced to 12 years in jail in Mainland China for stealing state secrets. What were troubling to the Hong Kong media were not only the severity of the punishment and the opacity of the trial process, but also China’s refusal to clearly define ‘state secret’.³ Similarly, while the Chinese government has repeatedly warned the Hong Kong media not to ‘advocate’ Taiwan independence, the difference between ‘advocacy’ and ‘reporting’ has never been clarified.

When a boundary is clearly drawn, people can stand as close to the boundary as possible. When a boundary is blurred, the safe strategy is to stay away. As Lee (1998) explicates, self-censorship results from journalists imagining that an action would incur punishment. Strategic ambiguity is effective in widening the space of such imagination.

Nevertheless, self-censorship was far from the only response from the Hong Kong media towards political pressure. The Hong Kong media are mostly commercial organizations. They have to compete with, and hence respond to, each other. Besides, journalists in mainstream media are professionals largely adhering to the norms of liberal journalism (Chan, Lee, & Lee, 1996). Most citizens also support the principles of press freedom and media as independent actors monitoring the power holders (Lee, Chan, & So, 2005). Certainly, the Hong Kong society and media market are pluralistic. Some media outlets have become more pro-China over time, while others have de-politicized themselves.⁴ But when defending press freedom is concerned, it is significant that some media organizations, because of their concerns with credibility and professional integrity, have attempted to develop methods to handle the political pressure without hugely compromising their professionalism.

Drawing upon Tuchman (1978), Lee (2000) called such responses ‘strategic rituals’, defined as the ‘peculiar and twisted ways that media organizations routinize their news work in order to credibly meet extraordinary political pressure and to uphold their own limited legitimacy’ (p. 317). Examples of strategic rituals include the increasing use of juxtapositions between positive and negative views towards the power holders, the increasing use of polls as ‘scientific’ indicators of public opinions, the increasing use of academics as ‘a-political’ authorities on public affairs, and the adoption of rhetorical strategies to construct ‘neutral and objective’ editorials and commentaries.

With these techniques, ‘professionalism’ becomes a self-defense when the media are criticized. Arguably, part of the Hong Kong media has intensified their objective approach to news since the handover. However, objectivity is a two-edged sword. Practices of objective journalism—e.g. emphasis on hard facts, concerns with formal titles of sources, balance of viewpoints—have long been criticized for leading to the lack of journalistic responsibility and a bias towards the establishment (e.g. Glasser, 1992; Tuchman, 1978). In Hong Kong, whether journalistic objectivity is a helpful tool to fight against political pressure or merely a disguise of self-censorship has to be evaluated in a case-by-case manner.

Structurally speaking, whether an objective media can provide diverse viewpoints would depend on whether critical opinions in the society are vocal enough and whether alternative channels exist to allow such opinions to be expressed. This is the background against which the talk radio phenomenon can be understood. Rising in prominence since the mid-1990s (Lee, 2002), several radio talk shows and their hosts have acquired additional significance after the handover. Besides being popular among radio audience, the shows were highly rated by professional journalists as a ‘representative’ channel of public opinion expression. As Lee, Chan, and So (2003) explained, journalists rated talk radio highly partly because the medium allowed them to adopt the gesture of ‘objective reporting’ when covering the critical views aired through the shows.

The popularity of talk radio and the newspaper Apple Daily, which adopts an anti-government and pro-democracy editorial line, demonstrates the existence of a market for media outlets critical towards the power holders. The few outlets which dared to tap into this market thus served as boundary testers in the media scene. They enlarged the space for other media outlets to operate. The demise of critical talk radio, to be discussed later, thus represented a significant loss.

But at least before 2004, the strategic interaction outlined above had maintained a more or less stable equilibrium. Political pressure was applied by China only with indirect methods, and media organizations interested in maintaining their professionalism responded with a range of defensive strategies. The presence of a few boundary testers further ensured the apparent robustness of press freedom, even though self-censorship remained a recurrent concern.

From Self-censorship to Cultural Co-orientation

As stated earlier, media self-censorship has long been highlighted as a major problem in Hong Kong. After the handover, perceptions of self-censorship remained widespread among professional journalists. In a recent survey of Hong Kong journalists conducted in 2006, ⁵ 26.6% of journalists reported that self-censorship existed and was ‘very serious’, while 47.2% reported that self-censorship existed ‘but is not very serious’. Only 3.2% reported that there was no self-censorship at all.

Perceptions of self-censorship also existed, though to a lesser extent, among the general public. A series of university-conducted polls show that, since September 1997, the proportion of citizens regarding the practice of media self-censorship as existent has been fluctuating around the 40% level.⁶

Of course, perceptions are not proofs of the existence of self-censorship. So, are there concrete evidence pointing to the problem? Unfortunately, self-censorship is notoriously difficult to pin down. As the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) acknowledged in its 2005 Annual Freedom of Expression Report, ‘it is difficult to determine whether the sl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Media and Politics in Post-handover Hong Kong: An Introduction
• 1. Strategic Interaction, Cultural Co-orientation, and Press Freedom in Hong Kong
• 2. Professionalism, Politics and Market Force: Survey Studies of Hong Kong Journalists 1996-2006
• 3. Political Economy of Hong Kong Media: Producing a Hegemonic Voice
• 4. Negotiating Local and National Identifications: Hong Kong Identity Surveys 1996-2006
• 5. Constructing and Contesting the 'Order' Imagery in Media Discourse: Implications for Civil Society in Hong Kong
• 6. The HKSAR Government's PR Sense and Sensibility: Analysis of its SARS Crisis Management
• 7. Media and Large-scale Demonstrations: The Pro-democracy Movement in Post-handover Hong Kong
• Notes on Contributors
• Index