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So the guarantee, you'd think, is clear. No confusion there. No room for redefining what the pledge means. No scope for wringing some new and different sense out of it.
Why does this matter?
A free press is not an end in itself. It's part of the way you secure a free and open society. The role of the press is to hold the powerful to account, to break down, break through, scramble over, tunnel under, the barriers behind which bad decisions and corrupt decisions can too easily be made in secret.
Does a vigorous press make government weaker? I don't believe it does. Government is stronger as a result because it has to think much harder about the decisions it takes. A free press also helps to underpin the rule of law which protects the weak against the strong, the individual against the state.
The free, uninhibited flow of information is essential to a sophisticated market, especially a financial market like ours in Hong Kong. A booming media industry is part of a booming modern economy. Every year new periodicals and newspapers hit our news-stands. We have more newspapers per head of population than anywhere else in the world. And we're the South East Asia home for many newspapers, magazines, news agencies from Reuters and AP to Time, Newsweek, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune.
These are the signs of a free society, and the reasons for a free society. And Hong Kong will stay that way if we want it to do so, and if we make it plain that we care. As Thomas Paine wrote, "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must.. undergo the fatigue of supporting it".
The same point was put very eloquently at the beginning of the week by a magazine, read all around the world, which recently found itself in the middle of a trumped-up controversy. What it said bore on the points I've made today - on credibility and on advocacy. Some of it is worth repeating.