ARTICLE 19 and The Hong Kong Journalists Association
"to continuously attack the counter-revolutionary forces in Hong Kong [and] stop a small group of people from using Hong Kong as a base for subverting the central government".2
Beijing's strategy continues to be a concentration on winning back hearts and minds through concerted united front work through "building bridges to whosoever can be made sympathetic to the communist cause [and] isolating the hardcore enemies".?
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as
The visit to the territory in January 1992 of Lu Ping, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, saw the full force of China's united front tactics brought to bear against the UDHK and Hong Kong Alliance: both organizations had been marked "counter-revolutionary" in Beijing's 1991 annual policy review. Sowing the seeds of division among the liberal camp, Lu openly refused to meet with those liberals who "didn't speak the same language" and who "wished to overthrow the Chinese government",24 while courting others anxious to begin a genuine dialogue with Hong Kong's future rulers. Beijing continues to follow this strategy with regard to legislators who have been openly critical of China, and there is certainly concern that after 1997 those who oppose China may well find themselves excluded from the political process - if not the target of serious reprisals.
6.2.1 Wen Wei Po newspaper: Bringing the pro-China media to heel after 1989
The territory-wide shock and disillusionment at the violent suppression on 4 June was felt most acutely by the leftists in Hong Kong, some of whom were mainlanders posted temporarily to Xinhua News Agency or other pro-China organizations but many of whom were local residents working in these organizations.25 The crackdown buried a decade of optimism built on the launch of Deng's reform and open door policies in 1978, a decade during which the number of local recruits to the leftist cause among them patriotic journalists, politicians, intellectuals and businessmen - had swollen significantly.26
22 Contemporary, 15 Oct. 1991, 14-15.
23 Willy Wo-lap Lam, "China's men in HK still follow Mao", South China Morning Post, 29 April 1992. As Lam mentions, the united front concept is a key foundation of party strategy and has its origins in the Maoist principles of handling "contradictions between ourselves and the enemy" - principles developed when party members "were conditioned by the psychology of fighting battles to interpret reality as a constant struggle between the enemy and themselves" (see Albert Chen, supra note 1, 183).
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25
"Sowing division", Far Eastern Economic Review, 23 Jan. 1992.
The term leftist in the Hong Kong context refers broadly to those with pro-Communist Party or pro-China sympathies, and must be distinguished from the term "leftist" as used in China to refer to those of "conservative" or Maoist leanings (as opposed to "rightist", or those of reformist or "Dengist" leanings).
26
"The purge next door", Far Eastern Economic Review, 7 Sept. 1989, 77-78.
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