ARTICLE 19 and The Hong Kong Journalists Association
Propaganda Department kept routine files on local journalists, but sources with contacts in the Xinhua News Agency say there is now a more systematic and intensive surveillance of local journalists, particularly those who are critical of Beijing.42
To the handful of hostile publications and journalists, deemed counter-revolutionary, the news agency's campaign is isolating and attacking with vigour. To friendly publications and journalists, it dispenses rewards, while cultivating others that can be won over or, at the least, whose perspectives on China can be moderated in one way or another. The message of the campaign is a simple one: there is little advantage to be gained by adopting an "uncooperative and confrontational stance" with Beijing."3
43
Xinhua News Agency's revised strategies towards the media mark a significant toughening over its pre-massacre united front work. Prior to 1989, under its director Xu Jiatun, the agency sought carefully to "manufacture consent about China's legitimacy in Hong Kong". It worked hard to co-opt the media and drum up a climate of favourable opinion and support for the 1997 handover. Xinhua News Agency offered target publications and journalists an inside track on news, access to senior officials in Hong Kong and on the mainland, trips, perks, advertising benefits and a range of other "benefits". To favoured publishers and journalists it would also grant political appointments, much as the British have done to its own favoured elites: Louis Cha, the publisher of Ming Pao, and a one-time opponent of China, for example, was appointed to the Basic Law Drafting Committee (BLDC).*
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44
Since 1989 Xinhua News Agency has spent considerable effort in isolating and attacking its perceived enemies, the five China-watching magazines Contemporary, Pai Shing Semi-monthly, Cheng Ming, Nineties and Hoi Fong or Open magazine (none of the territory's newspapers or electronic media are believed to be in this fourth category). These publications remain strongly critical of Beijing, and of its policies in Hong Kong, and, in spite of their limited circulations, carry considerable weight among the wider media and intellectual community. As with Contemporary, most can lay claim to having shared, at one time or another, privileged access to senior Chinese officials both in Hong Kong and on the mainland.
But while each has experienced isolation and attacks, it is Contemporary that has been the main target of these tactics. Like the other four, Contemporary is effectively blacklisted from reporting on the mainland, its applications being routinely rejected without explanation. Its reporters are denied any access to Xinhua News Agency, or to other local Chinese organizations; officials in these organizations are understood to have been forbidden to have
42
China's minister for public security, Tao Siju, admitted in March 1992 that Beijing was accumulating information about all manner of people in Hong Kong presumed to be against the Chinese government, not just journalists. Xinhua News Agency's Zhou Nan, responding to this frank admission, denied the news agency was involved in such information gathering. However, few believe the denial to be anything more than a public relations exercise.
43
See supra note 28, at 25.
44
Joseph Man Chan and Chin-chuan Lee, supra note 12, at 5 and 50.
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