ARTICLE 19 and The Hong Kong Journalists Association
of senior party cadres, at policy and editorial level, in key organizations such as the People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency, as well as in CCP theoretical journals such as Seeking Truth. Unlike other areas of party policy, notably the economy where there are significantly divergent views between "conservatives" and "reformists", or "leftists" and "rightists", as to the nature and extent of centralized control, the Party's grip on the media continues to draw broad consensus across internal factions (though these factions vie among themselves to manipulate and control the media for their own purposes)."
The media has been a battleground for the survival of the Communist Party, both in its internecine struggles and in its cultivation of compliance among the population. In this context, it is not difficult to understand why the uncharacteristic "10-day window" of press openness during the 1989 Beijing demonstrations was met with such unqualified dismay by party leaders.' Sympathetic accounts of the student protests in the party newspaper, People's Daily, which was one of the first to break ranks, were followed by similar stories and photographs in newspapers around the country. More than one thousand journalists also signed a petition demanding more press freedom. The subsequent crackdown after the massacre fell heavily on journalists and on news organizations as internal investigations sought to root out sympathizers and reimpose obedience and loyalty to the CCP leadership.
6.2 CHINA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN HONG KONG SINCE 1989
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The democracy demonstrations in the spring of 1989 in Beijing, and the subsequent violent crackdown which began late on 3 June, brought people in Hong Kong on to the streets in their hundreds of thousands some estimate more than a million - on several occasions in sympathy and support. There was a spontaneous and genuine anger, and grief, at the brutality of the Chinese leadership's suppression. Mass rallies organized by the Hongkong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China heard crowds shouting "Chinese people do not kill Chinese people!", "Down with Li Peng!", the Chinese prime minister, and end "one-party tyranny" in China.
Beijing was said to be shocked at the scale and emotion of the reaction in Hong Kong. The massacre triggered a collapse of confidence in the territory, highlighting the inherent tensions of the post-1997 "one country, two systems" formula (particularly with regard to basic rights
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In the current infighting over economic reforms, control of the media is seen by the competing "reformist" and "conservative" factions as a crucial weapon. At the restart of the reform campaign in early 1992, for example, the conservative-led People's Daily was reticent in its support of Deng Xiaoping's moves, though "liberal" elements in the party propaganda machine have since succeeded in re-establishing an editorial foothold.
8
Albert Chen (1992), supra note 1, at 199.
Numerous journalists were arrested and detained without trial after June 4; others, such as Wang Juntao, deputy editor of the Beijing-based Economics Weekly, were given harsh prison sentences ranging from four to 13 years. Many simply lost their jobs, or were demoted or left idling as purges swept through their organizations; in one case, the Shangai-based World Economic Herald was shut down altogether.
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