ARTICLE 19 and The Hong Kong Journalists Association
Chinese leadership was said to have been particularly angered by the active role the Hong Kong news media had taken in covering the protests, and held that this was at least partly to blame for prolonging the demonstrations, and for galvanizing protests in the colony itself.13 In addition, Hong Kong news reports reaching China after 4 June, though in decreasing numbers after the ban on sales of local newspapers there, were nevertheless said to be undermining Beijing's efforts to whitewash the massacre.1 Taking the verbal offensive, the People's Daily accused the news media of "distorting facts and sensational reporting" and helping to instigate a plot by foreign and domestic political forces to dislodge the Chinese government and Communist Party.
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This official theory of the media's role in the "turmoil" was reiterated by Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing, in a speech to the National People's Congress on 6 July." Charging the Hong Kong media with scheming to unseat Deng Xiaoping, he quoted extensively from "subversive" news accounts in Ming Pao, the Hongkong Economic Journal, the Express, Wen Wei Po, the Emancipation Monthly and the Nineties Monthly.16 "Facts show that we were confronted not with student unrest in the normal sense," Chen said, "but with planned, organized and pre-meditated political turmoil."17
Much of the initial verbal attacks on the colony fell also on the Hongkong Alliance, the multi-sectoral coalition responsible for organizing local marches and rallies, as well as for collecting donations and assisting dissidents in escaping from the mainland. The Alliance, and particularly its leaders, legislators Martin Lee Chu-ming and Szeto Wah, were quickly identified as "subversive". Mirroring its domestic portrayal of a conspiracy, Beijing warned local people also to reject the small group of unpatriotic elements intent on making Hong Kong a "subversive base to overthrow the Chinese government and topple socialism".
By its own standards, China's retaliation on Hong Kong was restrained, confined as it was to verbal intimidation. More than anything, it suggested Beijing was aware of the risks of further alienating public opinion and exacerbating the crisis of confidence in the territory. Rather than criticizing the hundreds of thousands who marched for democracy in China, it sought instead to portray their actions as misguided patriotism, a misunderstanding of events in the capital, while at the same time taking care to identify and isolate its key "enemies" and opponents. Beijing was at pains also to reiterate its commitment to the Joint Declaration's principle of coexistence under "one country, two systems".
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13 "Count-down to the clamp-down", Index on Censorship, Jan. 1991, 20-23.
14 Supra note 11.
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"Mayor puts blame on HK publications", South China Morning Post, 7 July 1989. See also supra note 11.
16 Id.
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Id.
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