Media : ‘Big Brother’ is Watching Hong Kong Journalists : Beijing has begun to harass reporters and jail their sources. A scoop can be branded as treason.

Four years before it is scheduled to assume control of this prosperous British colonial enclave, the mainland Chinese government is sending a chilling message to journalists here: The days of a free press in Hong Kong are numbered.

The problem is that what the Hong Kong press corps calls a “scoop,” Communist leaders in Beijing often term treason. The kind of journalistic stealth that sometimes brings merit raises and journalism prizes in Hong Kong can carry a jail term inside China.

China’s official hands-off policy when it comes to other Hong Kong institutions, such as banking and trade, apparently does not apply to the colony’s lively press, in which more than 45 newspapers and 200 magazines representing viewpoints ranging from pro-Beijing to pro-Tapei vie for the public’s attention.

To emphasize that point and prepare the ground for the post-1997 era, the Chinese government over the last several months has conducted a selective crackdown on Hong Kong-based journalists working in China--and, just as importantly, on their sources inside the government.

Senior leaders, meanwhile, have opened a campaign warning Chinese citizens to keep mum when talking to foreigners and the outside press.

“The signal sent out by the Chinese government is now very clear,” commented Daisy Li, newspaper editor and chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Assn. “Hong Kong journalists have to ‘behave themselves,’ otherwise retribution is likely. Local (Hong Kong) journalists, who are considered by the Beijing authorities to be Chinese nationals and therefore liable to prosecution under Chinese laws, now face the distinct possibility of losing their liberty while they carry out their journalistic duties on the mainland.”

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this came in late August, when a junior editor of the official New China News Agency in Beijing was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly leaking an advance copy of a speech by Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin to a journalist for the Chinese-language Hong Kong newspaper, Express Daily.

The Hong Kong journalist, Leung Wai Man, was detained by Chinese authorities for seven days and released only after she signed a “confession.” She was banned from the People’s Republic for two years.

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The more severe penalty was reserved for the New China News Agency’s assistant domestic news editor, Wu Shishen, who was sent to prison for life for “selling state secrets overseas.” His crime was the equivalent of breaking the press embargo on a public address by President Clinton.

The editor’s wife, Ma Tao, a magazine editor for the Chinese news agency, was sentenced to six years in prison for allegedly delivering the text of the speech and collecting 5,000 yuan ($871) in payment.

A more recent case involved Hong Kong journalist Xi Yang, a reporter for the mainstream Chinese-language daily Ming Pao.

Xi, who was a journalist on the mainland before emigrating to Hong Kong in 1990, was arrested Sept. 27 and charged with “espionage” for allegedly working with an employee of the People’s Bank of China to obtain advance information about interest rates.

The bank employee, Tian Ye, was also charged.

The government, through the official New China News Agency, said both men confessed to the crime, noting that what Xi did “was quite different from the normal work of a journalist.” Both men remain in jail pending a closed-door trial.

The press crackdown has added to the already deep fears held by many Hong Kong journalists about their freedom and job security under Beijing rule.

A 1990 survey of Hong Kong journalists showed that nearly 70% believed that press freedom will be curtailed after 1997. About one-third of the 522 journalists who were polled said they wanted to emigrate from Hong Kong before the changeover.

The poll, supervised by Chinese University of Hong Kong lecturers Joseph Chan and Paul Lee and University of Minnesota professor Chin-Chuan Lee, was conducted before the recent Chinese government crackdown. However, it showed that a quarter of the journalists were already “apprehensive” when they wrote articles critical of the Chinese government.

Many believe that this nervousness about the future, coupled with the fact that the Hong Kong press corps is largely made up of young, inexperienced reporters, has led to widespread self-censorship by journalists and their editors.

Some of the colony’s newspapers and broadcast news organizations, anticipating the desires of their new political masters, have already softened their language when describing the Beijing regime.

“The self-censorship problem is very serious,” said Emily Lau, a former journalist who now serves as one of the elected representatives on the Hong Kong Legislative Council. “There has been a shift in the press toward playing up issues that China approves and downplaying those things that it opposes.”

Anti-Beijing political movements, such as Lau’s Full Democracy in ’95 organization, complain that local television stations boycott their press conferences while devoting slavish attention to the wooden pronouncements of the Hong Kong office the the New China News Agency.

“Journalists are afraid of being persecuted after 1997,” Lau said in an interview.

Even Chinese Communist Party sympathizers, such as Tsang Tak-sing, chief editor of the generally pro-Beijing newspaper Ta Kung Pao, agrees that the looming 1997 hand-over has created edginess.

“I do realize that some of our colleagues are worried,” said Tsang, 49, who was jailed by the British for his pro-China activities in 1967, when he was still in high school. “Today we operate under different standards than we will when the Basic Law takes effect.”

(The “Basic Law” is the special constitution for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region that was drafted after negotiations between Chinese and British diplomats. Scheduled to take effect on July 1, 1997, it ostensibly guarantees “freedom of speech, of the press and of publication.” However, it also allows prosecution for “theft of state secrets” and contains language very similar to that used by the Beijing government in its recent arrests of Hong Kong journalists.)

Tsang and other pro-China journalists argue that the Hong Kong press has never been truly free, at least until these final days of British colonial rule.

Tsang’s newspaper, Tak Kung Pao, was shut down by the British in 1952 after it published an editorial from the Chinese Communist newspaper, The People’s Daily. The newspaper’s publisher, editor and chief printer were all arrested and charged with sedition. The charges were dropped only after Chinese Premier Zhou En Lai threatened to intervene.

The recent Chinese government crackdown, Tsang said, should be judged in the context of the new openness of China in which hundreds of reporters, some of them representing clearly hostile political camps, have flooded into the mainland.

“I think we do have a problem here that we need to tackle,” Tsang said. “For years, Hong Kong was used as the listening post for China because no foreign journalists could be based in Beijing. What is happening is that China is opening up and allowing more journalists in, creating a market for inside information. As all governments have secrets to keep, this creates a potential problem of security. The problem is, where do you draw the line?”

As the 1997 deadline approaches, owners of newspapers and television networks, as well as reporters and editors, have begun to make adjustments.

In some cases, Beijing is able to wield its influence in the old-fashioned way, simply by using the resources of its state-owned businesses to buy advertisements in the newspapers that reflect the mainland political line.

For example, Hong Kong boasts two very influential Chinese-language business dailies, the Hong Kong Economic Journal and the Hong Kong Economic Times.

The fiercely independent Economic Journal supports British colonial Gov. Chris Patten’s call for democratic reforms.

The Economic Times, however, has a more neutral stance. The result is that mainland businesses and real estate companies now prefer to advertise in the Times, despite its slightly smaller circulation.

Another case of pre-1997 media realignment involves the magazine Pai Shing, long recognized for its analysis of internal Chinese politics. Recently, however, Pai Shing was purchased by Hong Kong businessman T. T. Tsui, who has extensive business connections with the People’s Liberation Army.

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According to longtime Hong Kong journalist Philip Bowring, president of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club, Pai Shing’s editorial stance has changed markedly toward Beijing since the purchase.

Finally, there is the celebrated case involving the sale by conservative international press magnate Rupert Murdoch of the English-language South China Morning Post--once the proud flagship of British Colonial rule--to pro-Beijing billionaire businessman Robert Kuok.

So far, say reporters and editors on the South China Morning Post, the change has not had any major effect on the newspaper’s coverage.

The South China Morning Post still editorially supports the democratic reform package proposed by Gov. Patten, who is widely detested by the Chinese Communist leadership.

Nevertheless, Malaysian-born Kuok, a member of business advisory council to the Chinese government, must have had some thoughts about the Chinese mainland’s future when he bought the newspaper.

With an eye toward expansion, the newspaper bought the copyright on a name for a potential new sister paper: The North China Morning Post.