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Urgent Business: Hong Kong, Freedom of Expression and 1997
territory. This is particularly in evidence when conflicts arise between Britain and China over the handover, as has happened with Governor Patten's reform proposals.
The Hong Kong media has operated also within the confines and narrow parameters of a colony. Colonial rule, although it has rarely meant the overt suppression of the media, nevertheless draws both explicit legal and regulatory boundaries with regard to freedom of expression, as well as more implicit restraints which work as an inducement to caution and conservatism. The commercial nature and structure of the media operating within the framework of colonial rule have been important factors contributing to the fair degree of precautionary self-censorship experienced in the territory (see section 5.5 below).
However, it is far from the truth to say that the media is wholly compliant. In recent years the media, particularly television, has been instrumental in building Hong Kong's own cultural identity, both creating and responding to local expectations arising from rapidly changing socio-economic circumstances. In the 1970s, as the partisan CCP and KMT presses lost their relevance and influence and the new independent media began taking up local issues and causes, presenting the concerns of a myriad of flourishing new pressure and special-interest groups. Yet the criticism had its limits. The borderline of acceptability clearly were challenges to the enterprise of colonialism itself, and these rarely appeared. Even since the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, mainstream media criticism of the government has - with some exceptions - not been aimed at the authority or right of the British to govern and to hand over Hong Kong to China, but the way in which this is carried out.
The Hong Kong government has over the years become skilled at co-opting the media and achieving its co-operation if not support. Much like China, it prefers to win over the press rather than coerce it (though it is capable of both), and has numerous tactics at its disposal to do so. At one level it hands out honorific awards and medals to publishers, and grants certain newspapers rights to carry lucrative legal advertisements. At another it works subtly to promote its cause and legitimacy.
Its most effective weapon has been the Government Information Services (GIS), which works to propagate government information, particularly in the media. It organizes press briefings (which can be selective to favoured newspapers or their editors, often at a very senior level), access to government departments and department heads, and gives daily news bulletins on government events and policies which a number of understaffed newspapers simply print without comment. With an often uncritical, untrained and underpaid press corps, the uptake of, government information without question can be high. It is not unusual to see, even in those papers with good reputations, stories which lie uncomfortably close to the government line, often without counter-comment from impartial or opposition sources.
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Joseph Man Chan and Chin-chuan Lee, Mass Media and Political Transition: The Hong Kong Press in China's Orbit, (New York: The Guildford Press, 1991), 40-42.
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