Media : Hong Kong’s Press Feels Chinese Chill : A local reporter recently received a 12-year prison term on the mainland for allegedly stealing state secrets. In turn, many of his colleagues have muted their criticism of Beijing.

The clock is ticking toward the 1997 hand-over of Hong Kong to China, and Johnny Lau is determined not to fall victim a second time to Beijing’s influence over the British colony’s press corps.

Lau, 40, was a Beijing correspondent for Wen Wei Po, a pro-China Chinese-language daily in Hong Kong, before falling out with the newspaper when he strayed from the Communist Party line in covering the 1989 Tian An Men Square pro-democracy movement.

Today, he is the deputy editor in chief of Contemporary, a Hong Kong-based China-watching magazine that he set up with some of his former Wen Wei Po colleagues. The monthly magazineprovides a glimpse through the veil of secrecy still shrouding the inner workings of China. It also routinely prints the type of sensitive information that recently earned a Hong Kong-based reporter working in China a 12-year prison term for allegedly stealing state secrets.

Fear is perhaps the most crippling result of this chilling message from Beijing, and many within the ranks of Hong Kong’s press hierarchy are bending under pressure from China.

“This case has cast a shadow over our work,” Lau said. “This is a Chinese government tactic to stop the Hong Kong press from doing anything that would offend them.”

The jailed journalist is Xi Yang, a Chinese citizen who reports for Hong Kong’s mainstream Chinese-language daily Ming Pao. He was jailed in March on vague charges that he stole sensitive information concerning Beijing’s plans for interest rate changes and international gold transactions. Tian Ye, an official at the People’s Bank of China and Xi’s co-defendant, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Lau said a verbal directive was allegedly given by the Chinese government to some of Hong Kong’s pro-China newspaper editors and reporters advising them not to talk about this case or to sign any petition in support of Xi. In May, Beijing temporarily banned 10 Hong Kong reporters from entering China. They all had signed a letter of protest to the Chinese government over Xi’s jailing.

(Pro-China reporters refused to be interviewed for this story.)

“These pro-China reporters . . . don’t want to endanger themselves by releasing any information about Xi Yang,” Lau said. “Most of them share the same feelings as other Hong Kong reporters and are sympathetic to Xi.”

The heavy sentences appear calculated to remind Hong Kong reporters of the risks involved when reporting in China today and of their vulnerability after the colony reverts to Chinese sovereignty in three years. But the head of the propaganda department of the Hong Kong branch of the New China News Agency, China’s de facto consulate here, denies there is a crackdown.

“There is no question of (China) trying to tighten or limit reporting activities in the (Chinese) mainland,” said Sun Nansheng. “I feel that a consensus is necessary; when we talk about press freedom, it should be discussed under the proposition of abiding by the laws of the (Chinese) mainland.”

But Xi’s case raises the questions of how China defines “state secrets” and of what constitute its rules governing news gathering in China. Currently, Hong Kong reporters have to apply for official permission to report in China and have to specify what events they want to cover.

“I now worry over whether the Chinese government will continue to allow me to go to China to do my reporting,” said Jerry To, a 31-year-old China-beat reporter for Ming Pao. “And when they do allow me into China, I will worry that someone will be following me when I contact my sources and that the telephone in my hotel room will be bugged.”

China’s techniques may sound as if they belong in a spy film, yet such methods may be intentionally heavy-handed in order to intimidate the Hong Kong press. And as the 1997 deadline approaches, publishers, editors and reporters alike are making adjustments for the new regime.

For now, the intimidation usually stops when reporters are back in the colony. But officials from the New China News Agency’s Hong Kong branch are watching, and they routinely let the colony’s reporters and editors know when they don’t approve of their coverage of the Chinese mainland.

“A Xinhua (New China News Agency) official I know quite well, who has since left the agency, once took me aside at (an agency-hosted) dinner and told me that I should be more careful” when writing about China, said Briton Danny Gittings, 28, a political editor and columnist for the Sunday edition of Hong Kong’s English-language South China Morning Post newspaper. “I was a bit taken aback, but I don’t feel threatened because the worst that can happen to me is that I’ll be kicked out of Hong Kong in three years’ time.”

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Many members of Hong Kong’s press, however, lack the security of a foreign passport, and those who don’t want to risk sharing Xi’s fate may tone down their coverage of China.

“The immediate impact of Xi Yang’s case is that there will be less reporting on China,” said Daisy Li, assignment editor for Ming Pao and head of the Hong Kong Journalists Assn. “Clearly, it’s a kind of self-censorship but not without the fear.”

Observers say the Hong Kong Standard, one of three English-language newspapers here, is taking a less critical attitude toward China following a visit to Beijing in late 1992 by the paper’s chairman. The Sing Tao group, which publishes the Hong Kong Standard and two Chinese-language newspapers, has committed millions of dollars to business ventures in China, including a 50-50 joint-venture agreement with Beijing’s Chinese-language People’s Daily to publish a color magazine.

“The Sing Tao group was one of the first publishers to have joint-venture interests with China, so everyone thinks it will be subjected to heavy influence by the Chinese government because of its proprietary connections with the (Chinese) mainland,” said a knowledgeable source.

Ming Pao’s To said his close friends are trying to persuade him to leave journalism and enter a less risky profession.

“As long as I’m a reporter here, I have to bear the risks that go with doing my job,” he said. “But I have some concerns because I want to be around to take care of my parents, who are getting old.”

Gittings said he’d like to stay on after 1997 but feels he may be pushed aside to make room for a Hong Kong Chinese who speaks Mandarin, China’s official language.

And Lau vows to stay on and keep publishing. “We are helping to shape a new China,” he said. “There will be ups and downs along the way, but China cannot close its door anymore.”