In what language?
INWARD SAVING TELEGRAM
By Confidential Bag
POLITICAL DISTRIBUTION
28
A
FROM SINGAPORE TO FOREIGN OFFICE
(From Commissioner General South East Asia)
Mr. Scrivener
No. 115 Saving
29th July, 1949.
PRIORITY
R. 9th August, 1949.
Addressed to Rangoon, telegram No. 180 of 29th July and to Bangkok, Saigon and Hong Kong, repeated for information Saving to Foreign Office and Nanking.
Following for Information Office from R.1.0,
Following is text of talk braodcast yesterday from British Far Eastern Broadcasting Service.
2.
[Begins]
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN HONG KONG
In the British Parliament yesterday, the Under-Secretary for the Colonies, Mr. Rees-Williams, was asked why permission had been given to the Chinese Communists in Hong Kong to continue publishing newspapers and pamphlets, in view of the closing by the Comunists of the British Information Service in Shanghai. The Under-Secretary replied that it had been the consistent policy of the Hong Kong Government to permit freedom of the press and of publication of all shades of opinion provided these activities did not violate the law or prejudice public security. In general, he said, these limits had not been over-stepped.
This freedom is part of the traditions of Hong Kong, and goes back to the very earliest days of the Colony, when the noted Chinese reformer, Wang Tao - a contemporary of Prince Ito, the builder of modern Japan found refuge from the Court reactionaries in Hong Kong, and there carried on, as editor of a Chinese newspaper, his persistent and persuasive campaign for the reform of China. him came Dr, Sun Yat-sen, who proclaimed many years ago that Hong Kong and its University were his intellectual birthplace, from which he derived his revolutionary and modern ideas.
After
"I compared my birthplace at Heungshan with Hong Kong" he said, "and although they are only fifty miles apart, the difference of the government oppressed me very much. Afterwards I saw the outside world, and I began to wonder
/how it was