The Foreign Correspondents' Club Hong Kong

Generation HK, a new Hong Kong nation and a collision course with Beijing

Journalist and author Ben Bland read a passage from his new book, Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow. Photo: Sarah Graham/FCC

Two days after Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a tough speech reasserting Beijing’s authority over Hong Kong, the spotlight fell on Generation HK as journalist Ben Bland talked about his book on the city’s disenfranchised youth.

During the July 3 club lunch, Bland, the South Asia correspondent for the Financial Times, defined Generation HK, a term he himself coined: “In basic terms it’s those who came of age since the handover… perhaps those who were 18 or younger in 1997.”

He explained that his book Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow, was a series of portraits of young people from varying backgrounds who have grown up in post-handover Hong Kong but feel little connection to the British colonial era, nor do they associate with China. Instead, he said, they are trying to carve out their own identity as Hongkongers, with some even imagining a new “Hong Kong nation”.

In a Q&A session after Bland had given a short reading from his book, he said fuelling this search for an identity was an element of frustration with inequality in terms of housing and employment in the city. Since 2014’s Occupy Central protests, he said, young Hongkongers had become more radical while at same time the Chinese government was increasingly stamping its authority on the city and that “as a result young people are pushing back harder.” Bland added that he believed there was a real risk that young people and Chinese government are on “a quite worrying collision course”.

When asked how much Generation HK could be racked up to the natural youthful impatience of all young people, and how much of it reflected the idea of being “spoilt children”, Bland said: “That’s one of the unanswered questions… At a time when, in many places in the world, people are worried about apathetic youth, these people have gone to exceeding lengths to fight for what they believe in.” He added that he didn’t believe these were “annoying young people who are inpatient”.

Watch Ben Bland discuss his new book, Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow

But he said he believed part of the push back against China happens because “China talks to Hong Kong young people on a different frequency”. Bland said the challenge for China was to engage young Hongkongers.

Bland revealed that writing the book had at times been challenging because wealthier young Hongkongers were reluctant to share their thoughts on universal suffrage and the Chinese government. He did manage to get one man from the “tycoon classes” to talk to him who told him that his British passport had felt meaningless. Bland said Hong Kong’s identity issues don’t just affect the lower classes, but reach across to business people too. But for those with money and business interests it is often easier to do a deal and put moral worries on the back burner.

Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow is published by Penguin Books and is available on Amazon Kindle.

In pictures: FCC Hong Kong Handover 20th anniversary party

It was 20 years ago today… And FCC members and guests marked the Handover anniversary in fitting style by partying the night away at the club. Here’s our rogues’ gallery.

Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections On A Borrowed Place – watch the anthology launch

As Chinese President Xi Jinping prepared to touch down in Hong Kong on his first visit since taking office in 2012, poets, writers and artists gathered to launch an anthology to mark the 20th Anniversary of the Handover. Watch the book’s contributors read passages and poems from the anthology, followed by a Q&A session.

Part 1

Part 2

FCC archives: Not just a soundbite – Chris Patten’s plea as the Handover approached

FCC member and Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, asks the world’s press not to forget the territory after the Handover in this piece reproduced from the 1997 special edition of The Correspondent

Former HK Governor Chris Patten at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in October 1998. Photo by Kees Metselaar

The journalists are coming. At last count more than 8,400 of them to cover one of the greatest end-of-millennium peacetime stories.

As Anson Chan said in a speech in Manila the other day, if Hong Kong can survive that, the rest should be easy.

But will it? That’s the 64,000 dollar question all those interviewers, commentators, analysts and writers will be posing as they report this postscript of Empire.

I’ve been asked the question a million times already – well, it feels like a million times – and will no doubt be asked again and again before Britannia glides through the great bowl of light that will illuminate our magnificent harbour shortly after June 30 has turned into July 1.

FCC members know my answer pretty well. It is that Hong Kong will go on being one of the greatest cities in the world – provided that the promises of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong’s future are honoured.

I have no doubt that so long as the combination of political freedom and economic liberty, underpinned by the rule of law, is preserved and strengthened, Hong Kong can fulfil its potential as the New York of Asia.

That’s been at the heart of the debate we have been having these last five years. The people of Hong Kong understand that if if some of our critics don’t. Some of them think the 28th and last British governor of Hong Kong should have tip-toed round this issue and gone for a quiet life.

Will Hong Kong remain free? What do you really think of Hong Kong’s future prospects?

That was never an option. The choice was clear cut. Either I stood up for the people of Hong Kong and the freedoms and rights they were promised by Britain and China in the Joint Declaration, at the risk of having the occasional row with China; or I could have done what the Chinese wanted me to do – and spent the last few years in a row with the democrats who, by any measure, represent majority opinion in this community.

What sort of questions would journalists be asking me and Britain now if I had chosen the latter course? I know what those questions would have been and, frankly, I could not have answered them with a clear conscience.

But questions remain, and they will be fired in from every corner of the globe as the transition reaches its midnight climax. Can it work? Will it work? Will Hong Kong remain free? What do you really think of Hong Kong’s future prospects?

I’ll answer as I always do – as a rational and curious optimist with a belief in the people of Hong Kong. They have made this place the spectacular success story it is today and they can go on to a better tomorrow.

They can do that so long as they continue to demonstrate the self-confidence to stand up for their rights, as they did so recently in the face of threats to roll back some of their civil liberties. These are people who know what it’s like to live in a free society.

It will not be for the people of Hong Kong alone to speak up for those rights and freedoms. Britain will continue to do so. So will many others.

The media should keep the spotlight on Hong Kong, too. Not just at the historic moment when the flags change, but in the weeks and months and years – the decades – that follow.

Hong Kong must not be allowed to become a sound bite of history. Don’t forget – none of us should forget – that China has promised in the Joint Declaration to allow Hong Kong to continue pretty much as you find it today for the 50 years up to the year 2047.

Now that’s a story worth watching.

Update: Lord Patten, on June 28, gave an interview to The Guardian where he spoke of a sequence of “outrageous breaches” of the Sino-British handover agreement.

He said: “I don’t think that the outlook outside the European Union is one in which we are more likely to behave honourably towards Hong Kong than we have inside.”

“The worry is that there will never be a point at which we say to the Chinese: ‘No,’” Patten added.

Read the full article here.

We want reunification dialogue with North Korea, but only after nuclear program is stopped – South Korea

Enna Park, centre, during her press conference at the FCC. Photo: Sarah Graham/FCC

South Korea hasn’t taken its unification hopes off the table, but North Korea will need to ditch its nuclear program before such dialogue can begin, said South Korea’s Ambassador for public diplomacy.

Enna Park was talking at a press conference held at the FCC on June 27. She said that South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, was keen to open up communication with the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) but that talks were unlikely unless sanctions, coupled with incentives to drop nuclear development, were to come to fruition.

“When the conditions are right, when North Korea feels more comfortable talking with South Korea, we will have dialogue with North Korea. We will not attempt to unify North Korea by any means. It doesn’t mean we’re not keeping up our aspirations for reunification,” she said.

When asked whether South Korea’s new government was seeking engagement with North Korea, and whether the time was right for engagement in light of the death American student Otto Warmbier at the hands of the regime, Park said: “Yes, engagement is on the menu. No, it is not the right time to engage North Korea. The government wants to open the room to engagement if conditions are right in the future. We do not have a very concrete, clear description about conditions. It is subject to further consultation.”

She added: “The death of Otto Warmbier is very horrible, it reminds us of the horrible violation of human rights by North Korea.”

On the topic of South Korea’s plans to deploy a U.S. anti-missile system, and China’s reaction by urging boycotts of South Korean companies operating in China, Park said the government’s priority was protecting its people: “Probably it’s better not to try to please everybody. It is a critical asset to us to protect our own security. The priority is our national interest, our security. The top priority is not how to please the others.”

…we cannot rule out some intentional launch of missiles towards China under circumstances in the future.

She added that she was aware that China was concerned with how the system might be used – “they have their own concerns on the possible use of system to surveil what’s going on inside Chinese territory” – but said that her government was ready to discuss those concerns with China.

Having worked for many years at the Korean embassy in Beijing, Park also shed light on the threat felt by China from its ally North Korea. “The direction of missiles launched by North Korea is usually headed to South Korea western sea or eastern sea,” she said. “I think China had some worries about a possible mistake… or we cannot rule out some intentional launch of missiles towards China under circumstances in the future.”

Park also talked of the bridges South Korea is are attempting to build with Japan, with which it also has historical conflict, namely the use of Korean females as “comfort women” for Imperial Japanese soldiers during World War II. She said South Korea’s previous government had wanted to resolve historic matters before pressing on with any regional partnership.

“The previous government took the approach that we have to solve history problems first then liaise with Japan, but this approach actually didn’t bring any good result,” Park said. “So the new government has a two track approach: on one hand we’ll continue to work on history issues. On the other hand we will work with Japan to achieve common goals – solving the nuclear problems of North Korea and establishing peace in the region… creating synergy for economy, so many things that we can work together.”

When World War II ended in 1945, Japan lost control of Korea to Allied forces, leaving Korea to be divided in two, with the Soviet Union administering the northern half and the United States administering the southern half. Since then, the threat of nuclear annihilation as the north began developing nuclear capabilities has hung over the south.

Globalisation is coming to an end – but communism unlikely to rule, says top economist

Economist Stephen King explained how globalisation was soon to be a thing of the past. Photo: Sarah Graham/FCC

Globalisation is on its deathbed as people see inequality in wealth and some of the world’s richest countries seek to withdraw from cross-border partnerships, according to HSBC economist and author, Stephen King.

Speaking at a club lunch on June 20, King said that in the West we’re seeing a rejection of the values of globalisation amid a growing belief that institutions such as NATO and the European Union are less effective and, in some cases, no longer fit for purpose. He gave U.S. President Donald Trump pulling out of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), and China creating the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) as examples of how some countries are becoming more isolationist as they focus on their domestic interests over global relationships.

King said we reached peak enthusiasm for globalisation in 1989, when Berlin Wall came down.

The author of Grave New World: The End of Globalisation, the Return of History, conceded that in some cases it appears that there is a swing back to Liberalism, citing the recent French election victory of Emmanuel Macron and the drubbing of the Conservative Party in the U.K. election. But King said generally there appeared to be a new global narrative: them and us. For example, Greece and Germany: who is to blame for the financial collapse of the Mediterranean country? Greece, for years of financial mismanagement, or Germany for giving the Greeks over-generous loans?

“Once you get into blame and counter blame, you can see how globalisation ends up in trouble,” he said.

He discussed technology as a tool that, until now, has boosted globalisation. But he warned that although technology had enabled living standards to rise rapidly, globalisation instead depends on ideas and institutions.

When asked to give his thoughts on the likelihood of a global revival of communism, he was a little more upbeat. King said it would be difficult for any country to deliver fully-fledged communism when other systems where it has existed are in retreat.

FCC archives: Hong Kong, signed and sealed: An exhibition by Pat Elliott Shircore

This article is reproduced from the June 1997 special edition of The Correspondent.

The image on this month’s cover is a montage of the original Hong Kong lease and Treaty of Nanjing created by Hong Kong graphic designer and club member Pat Elliott Shircore. It is part of a portfolio of editorial and fine art images that Pat has created from the original documents.

Hong Kong was ceded in perpetuity to Britain under the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. Half a century later the ‘ownership’ was extended under lease, by the 1898 Convention of Peking, for a period of 99 years. In 1984 Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government gave up all rights to Hong Kong and as is well documented, on June 30, 1997, Hong Kong will revert to Chinese sovereignty.

In the spring of 1996, Pat was working in her studio at home with the radio on when she heard a news item of no particular interest relating to the handover of Hong Kong, marking the end of the lease agreement with China. It suddenly occurred to her “What does the lease actually look like – physically” and realised that she had never seen a picture of it; so she asked around to see whether anyone else had. People had seen pictures of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, but no one had seen the lease.

Research unearthed the fact that there were eight original copies of the document, four in Peking and four in London, so last June she went to London and dug out the British copies.

To her delight she discovered they were not only interesting but also very beautiful. One copy is bound in the Foreign Office standard crimson clothboard, but another lies between two thin wooden boards, covered in silk brocade, lined inside with yellow Emperor silk and tied with yellow silk ribbons.

The documents are a mixture of both English text and Chinese calligraphy, British Royal seals and various Chinese chops amongst which is that of the Emperor Kuang Hsu; main signatories include members of the Tsungli Yamen (Chinese Foreign Office), Claude Macdonald and Lord Salisbury.

Pat returned to Hong Kong with colour copies of the 1898 Convention of Peking (“the Lease”), as well as relevant pages from the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, and has produced a series of pictures loosely based on these documents. She scanned them into her Macintosh computer and has mixed the Chinese calligraphy, English text, chops, signatures and textures together with her own graphic elements, to create a series of unique digital art images.

Since contributing a set of twenty graphic illustrations to ProFile photo library, intended for use with editorial pieces, Pat has developed the theme much further and has completed a new art portfolio of thirty images that stress the artistic and stylistic beauty of the lease documents. Her work has resulted in strong, almost abstract images of striking colours and subtle textures which will be produced as a Limited Edition of 97 pieces, printed lithographically on fine paper with hand torn edges and bearing the printer’s imprimatur seal, which she will exhibit at the Lan Kwai Fong Gallery, June 24 to July 31 and also at the club itself during the Handover.

Facebook is fighting fake news, but there’s no shortcut says Campbell Brown

Campbell Brown, centre, explained how Facebook was trying to stamp out fake news on its social media platform. Photo: Sarah Graham/FCC

Facebook is working hard to develop systems to combat the tide of fake news – but it’s education among users that will make the biggest dent, according to the social network’s head of news partnerships.

Speaking at the June 14 club lunch, former TV news anchor Campbell Brown, who since January has been Head of News Partnerships for Facebook, said it was important to equip people with the tools make informed decisions on the type of content they share.

Facebook has recently come under fire over the proliferation of financially and politically motivated fake news on its platform. Brown reiterated that the social network was doing all it could to ensure that such hoax stories were downgraded in users’ news feeds.

“Now news literacy is even more vital than ever,” she said. “We can only do so much on the text side… We need to work on the education side. There is no shortcut to this.”

One of several initiatives the social network has launched is the Facebook Journalism Project which, Brown said, works in three ways: collaborative development of news products; training and tools for journalists; and training and tools for everyone. Essentially, it seeks to try to help all users to identify fake news with the help of education, software and fact-checking.

Brown said that Facebook was finding that a growing number of fake news articles appearing online were financially motivated i.e. the more clicks an article gets the more money it makes through advertising. She said the social network recognised the need to build systems that do a better job of rewarding quality journalism. The fruits of Facebook’s labour were already paying dividends, she said, in that clickbait headlines were now appearing lower in users’ feeds.

We recognise that publishers are struggling and trying to find new sustainable business models

When asked to comment on how Facebook and internet search giant Google, the two biggest providers of news on the web, were now taking the lion’s share of digital advertising revenue at the cost of news organisations, Brown would only say that Facebook was working with news organisations to try to alleviate the pressure. “We recognise that publishers are struggling and trying to find new sustainable business models,” she said, adding that Facebook was “coming at this from many different directions” and “doing everything we can to ramp up on multiple fronts to work with publishers on this”.

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. Initially it was a social network platform for Harvard students only, but became so popular it was expanded to universities across America and Canada. In 2006 membership was opened to anyone aged over 13 anywhere in the internet-accessible world. As of March 2017, the social network has 1.94 billion monthly active users.

In 2015, Facebook overtook internet search engine giant Google as the premier provider of news on the internet.

Watch Campbell Brown’s talk

Aside from the occasional lawsuit – in 2004, Harvard seniors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narenda filed an unsuccessful lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had copied their idea and illegally used source code intended for the website he was hired to create for them – Facebook had been relatively free of controversy. However, the social network found itself accused of proliferating misinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, giving birth to the now popular term, “fake news”. In short, fake news is deliberate misinformation written in the style of traditional news, designed to mislead in order to gain financially or politically. Facebook was accused, through its algorithm, of helping Donald Trump get elected by allowing fake news to outperform genuine news.

Facebook’s response to its critics was to pledge a crackdown on fake news by allowing users to report articles they felt were misleading, and then passing those stories to independent fact-checking services. If the articles are deemed not to be factual, Facebook gives them a “disputed” tag that warns users before they share the content. It promptly formed the News Integrity Initiative, saying: “We’ve joined a group of over 25 funders and participants — including tech industry leaders, academic institutions, non-profits and third party organisations — to launch the News Integrity Initiative, a global consortium focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.”

Founding funders of the $14 million fund include Facebook, the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Tow Foundation, AppNexus, Mozilla and Betaworks.

“The initiative’s mission is to advance news literacy, to increase trust in journalism around the world and to better inform the public conversation. The initiative, which is administered by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will fund applied research and projects, and convene meetings with industry experts,” its website states.

Facebook’s efforts to stamp out fake news haven’t been all plain sailing. In some cases, it’s had the opposite effect and some articles that have been debunked have gone viral. Additionally, it appears Facebook may be too slow in adding its “disputed” tag to such stories.

According to a report last month in The Guardian: “ABC News, for example, has a total of 12 stories on its site that its reporters have debunked as part of its Facebook partnership. But with more than half of those stories, versions can still be shared on Facebook without the disputed tag, even though they were proven false.”

In March 2017, Facebook issued guidance on how to spot fake news stories:

Look closely at the URL

A phony or look-alike URL (the web address at the top of your browser) may be a warning sign of false news. Many false news sites mimic authentic news sources by making small changes to the URL. You can go to the site to compare the URL to established sources.

Investigate the source

Ensure that the story is written by a source that you trust with a reputation for accuracy. If the story comes from an unfamiliar organisation, check their “About” section to learn more.

Watch for unusual formatting

Many false news sites have misspellings or awkward layouts. Read carefully if you see these signs.

Consider the photos

False news stories often contain manipulated images or videos. Sometimes the photo may be authentic, but taken out of context. You can search for the photo or image to verify where it came from.

Inspect the dates

False news stories may contain timelines that make no sense, or event dates that have been altered.

Check the evidence

Check the author’s sources to confirm that they are accurate. Lack of evidence or reliance on unnamed experts may indicate a false news story.

Look at other reports

If no other news source is reporting the same story, it may indicate that the story is false. If the story is reported by multiple sources you trust, it’s more likely to be true.

Is the story a joke?

Sometimes false news stories can be hard to distinguish from humour or satire. Check whether the source is known for parody, and whether the story’s details and tone suggest it may be just for fun.

Some stories are intentionally false

Think critically about the stories you read, and only share news that you know to be credible.

FCC archives: Advance Hong Kong! Group set up to polish up city’s image

This article is reproduced from the June 1997 special edition of The Correspondent.

The Correspondent’s coverage of the inaugural Advance Hong Kong meeting.

The first meeting of a new group dedicated to improving the world’s view of Hong Kong proved to be ill-tempered. The Correspondent reporter was riveted to his seat at the front of the room. Also on this page, Jonathan Mirsky of The Times and Steve Vines of The Independent in London, share their thoughts on Advance Hong Kong.

If there is one thing the first meeting of Advance Hong Kong demonstrated, it is that there are two sides to every story.

Advance Hong Kong is a pressure group set up by FCC member Ted Thomas to “talk back” to the international media which, he says, is feeding the rest of the world biased stories about how Hong Kong is doomed. The inaugural meeting of the AHK at the FCC was riven with distrust on both sides of the media camp.

A few days before the meeting, Advance Hong Kong had published the following advertisement in the South China Morning Post: “Help us stop 5 billion people being fed garbage.”

The veteran Thomas and fellow Advance Hong Kong member Thomas Axmacher, who is chairman of the Hong Kong Hotels Association, claimed that the foreign media had been busy blackening the name of the territory. The likes of Robert Chua, the owner of a “No news, no sex, no violence” satellite TV channel targeted at China, came along to give support.

“The press has successfully killed the golden goose,” Axmacher had roared, as he blamed the media for 10,000 reservations of Hong Kong’s 34,000 hotel rooms being cancelled for the Handover.

Axmacher and Thomas memorably quoted “taxi driver wisdom” to amen their points. Axmacher said that at recent hotel industry fairs in Tokyo and Osaka journalists had asked “questions like they were coming from the moon”.

Next up was Chua, who complained that “not one single person has ever congratulated me” on the return of Hong Kong to China. Chua said that reporters and commentators had been “misusing their freedom” in their coverage of the Handover story.

After the formal presentations came the questions.

The first came from Bernard Wijedoru, an engineer by profession, whose business card lists him as being a “PRC appointed Hong Kong District Affairs Advisor” and “Committee Member, Association for Celebration of Reunification of Hong Kong with China”.

“No, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy,” he began before saying, “Bad news is better than good news.”

The premise of his question was that the territory is a victim of a “Western conspiracy and that (it) cannot succeed except as a western colony”.

Thomas’s response was swift: “No, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy,” he began before saying, “Bad news is better than good news.”

Another speaker was Elaine Goodwin who has spent 27 years in Hong Kong and who offered a reminder of what life in Hong Kong is about. She noted that it is safe for a woman to be out by herself at four o’clock in the morning and “we don’t have serial killers because our police catch them”.

Observers at the meeting suggested that both Wijedoru and Goodwin represented Advance Hong Kong’s two partisan lobbies: the older expat community and the pro-China constituency.

The pro-China lobby was also represented by some of the local speakers who appeared to feel more affinity to the future than the past. That at least was the view of speaker Sam Ho, who added that he was “very upset” at all the China-bashing.

The general irritability of some of the supporters of Advance Hong Kong was illustrated after a couple of reporters’ questions to the panel, after which one of them demanded, “Who pays you? Who pays you?”

Towards the end of the meeting matters came to a head, although not a resolution, when yet another skeptical question was posed from the front of the room. Frank, a burly expatriate, then told all the skeptics to “bugger off as quickly as possible. There are plenty of planes”.

As Winston Churchill, who was a Great Communicator long before the spin doctors got into the business, said: “Everyone is in favour of free speech. But some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else also says something bad, that is an outrage.”

Print the negs, by Steve Vines

Stephen Vines

Why is the foreign media not writing the good news about Hong Kong? Why, say our apparently growing band of critics, must we always accentuate the negative? Like the ghastly mother of the rule-breaking ballroom dancer in the brilliant Australian film “Ballroom Dancing” [sic], we are urged to put on our “happy face” when we address the public.

The sad face should, we are told, be tucked away in a drawer somewhere. The problem is that the public is not really interested in what may be labelled good news or bad news, it wants what may be called real news.

Real news tends to be about people and events at times of change. It may be a very small change, such as the closure of a series of roads, or a really big change like the change in sovereignty due to occur in Hong Kong on July 1.

By definition the news is not necessarily good or bad but interesting because it relates to dynamic events.

Thanks to the efforts of our esteemed FCC member Ted Thomas, an interesting group of fellows, mainly expatriate, public relations men, businessmen and others have been drawn together to form an organisation dedicated to denouncing the foreign press for spreading a negative image of the colony.

At their founding meeting carefully selected members of the audience were called upon to deliver testimonials about how the dreadful foreign media were undermining their businesses. They told tales of meeting taxi drivers in far flung places who had a distorted picture of Hong Kong’s stability.

Fortunately, for the spreaders of disinformation, like myself, Mr Thomas and his cronies came up with an entirely barmy solution to the problem. I say fortunately because I would hate to have to defend every single report filed from Hong Kong, many of which are as barking as the new organisation.

Their solution? Get this: they proposed to sign up a bunch of no hopers drawn from the ranks of foreign journalists (believe me, no one but a no hoper would be party to this scheme) and get them to visit newsrooms around the globe to tell editors that their coverage of Hong Kong is inaccurate and unfair. Presumably the said editors would then have a total rethink of their Hong Kong coverage, kick out the generally well-respected correspondents based here and replace them with the aforementioned no hopers, who would write glowing reports about what’s happening.

The PR men are mobilised, at an hourly rate, like the world’s oldest profession, to improve the message but what are they to do if the message is less than, shall we say, perfect?

Alternately they might be shown the door or even fail to be invited in for a chat. PR men have some strange ideas about what goes on in newsrooms.

Although this is up there among the more crazy of the schemes which I have had the misfortune to witness, it is far from unique. There is an understandable tendency for people to question the messenger more closely than the message. Bad news is therefore the fault of those bringing the news. The Romans dealt with this rather severely by killing messengers delivering ill tidings. Nowadays we die a slow death (figuratively, I stress) caused by prolonged wingeing.

The PR men are mobilised, at an hourly rate, like the world’s oldest profession, to improve the message but what are they to do if the message is less than, shall we say, perfect?

I spent many years covering the Middle East, specifically the Israel-Palestine conflict. The memory of messenger shooting in those days still haunts me. I recall being harangued by government spokesmen for being part of a ‘Zionist plot’ or alternately ‘an anti-Semitic conspiracy’ because I had reported something which one side or the other did not like.

Lamentably no one has ever allowed me to join their plot. Even here in Hong Kong I have never been approached by the CIA, MI5 or whoever, to do their dirty work. I’m not saying I would help them, but sometimes a chap likes to be asked.

Don’t get me wrong, the average hack, or journalists as we are sometimes called, is no paragon of virtue. We come in all shapes and sizes. All human life is here from low, to lower and, just occasionally we hit some highs. I can say, hand on heart, that some of the very worst people I’ve met are journalists.

I can equally say that some of the best are drawn from the same trade. The idea that this notoriously hard to organise bunch of people could ever be part of anyone’s plot to do down any spot on earth is so absurd that only very gullible people could believe it.

Yet we do suffer from herd-like behaviour and hacks do tend to follow the herd, even if it is leading in a wrong direction. This, however, should not be construed as being part of a plot. It is no more than stupidity. I don’t think there is much to be gained from defending stupidity, but I hate to see it confused with well thought out intent.

None of us is perfect. I’m told that even PR men suffer from imperfection, but that’s no more than a rumour. Mostly we are just working stiffs, trying to get a job done. Lamentably, for the conspiracists, it is no more complex than that.

Ted’s folly? by Jonathan Mirsky

Jonathan Mirsky

It is always fashionable to attack the press and often with good reason. much of what appears in it is garbage. Or offensive.

An editor recently asked me to go to Taiwan to interview the mother of a kidnapped, tortured and murdered girl. I said I assumed she was joking. Yes, indeed. Much dreck in the papers. As in public relations. For those who missed Mr Thomas’ meeting in late April, this – with a few cuts for space – is how I reported it for my paper. Mr Thomas told me later it was fair.

A group of Hong Kong businessmen yesterday condemned the foreign press for its biased reporting during the period before the transfer of sovereignty to China, and blamed the international media here for causing the hotel, tourist and retail businesses to decline badly.

The newly founded group, Advance Hong Kong, held its first meeting, attended by about 100 mostly foreign tourist agency and hotel managers, factory owners, artists and retail shop owners, who accused international journalists of causing people in Europe and Japan, as one of them put it, to ‘think that Hong Kong was going down the slippery slope and is doomed because of the Handover to China’.

The group was formed and the meeting last night chaired by Ted Thomas, a public relations executive.

China is responsible for its own bad image: Tibet, Wei Jingsheng, US campaign money, Tiananmen – a poisonous cocktail.

“We are going to fight fire with fire,” said Mr Thomas, who announced that he intended to pay the travel and hotel expenses of Hong Kong-based journalists and ‘tell editors and publishers what a great place Hong Kong is’.

Mr Thomas declared at the outset that no one could speak at the meeting ‘except those who are like-minded’. After about a dozen in the audience spoke about the harm the international press had caused the hotel business, whose bookings for the period after the summer were claimed to have sunk by over 10 per cent, and the tourist business, about which the same was said, Mr Thomas told reporters, “I hope you report that the views at this meeting are unanimous”.

James Tien, president of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, said yesterday, however, that successful international businesses paid no attention to the press and based their views of Hong Kong’s future on what local experts told them.

Mr Thomas has written to me that he can’t yet name what he terms his ‘apostles’ or ‘ambassadors’ because some of those interviewed might not meet his standard and he would not want to embarrass the failures. I warned him that a journalist showing up in a respectable newsroom with ‘good news’ about Hong Kong, and on expenses, would be lucky to be invited to submit a written piece in the traditional manner.

Of course, what Mr Thomas and his supporters allege about the press bad-mouthing and its near-fatal effects is nonsense, especially since they can’t deny most of the local economy is booming. Their selected quote from Keith Richburg says it all, that ‘activists’ had demonstrated. Well, they did and Keith reported it. Just as he recently reported on the man who goes about writing curious messages on walls. That’s what we do: report.

Mr Thomas and his friends say hotel bookings are down. I make two suggestions: First, investigate the effect of the scare campaign last year by the hotels that they would be packed out this summer, urging early booking, and posting outrageous rates. Second, China is coming to Hong Kong. People read Mr Tung’s plans for a ‘stable’ city which – can there be anything weirder? – forbids demonstrations for Tibet’s and Xinjiang’s independence and will not register political parties which ‘threaten national security’.

Things like that worry people. Bookings are down in China too. China is responsible for its own bad image: Tibet, Wei Jingsheng, US campaign money, Tiananmen – a poisonous cocktail. As James Tien says, it doesn’t stop businessmen from investigating here. What might slow them down is another factor, discussed by Philip Segal in the IHT, May 16 and 17: what is the Hong Kong economy?

Of course, press bashing has a corollary: press control. Mr Tung has only to mention the international media in a certain tone at a business lunch and he gets thunderous applause. He never mentions the local press which is not entirely tamed yet, in which his vision of a Hong Kong where research on Tibetan pr Taiwanese independence is illegal and is scrutinised critically.

No, it’s the international press. A foreign reporter recently asked Mr Tung if his, the reporter’s, life would change on July 1. Wait and see, said Mr Tung. I can’t wait that long, said the reporter.

OK, said the future chief executive, read Basic Law, Article 23. And Mr Thomas thinks we’re a threat.

Hong Kong’s government not held to account by local press, FCC debate hears

Left to right: Shirley Yam, Florence de Changy, Chip Tsao. Photo: Sarah Graham/FCC

A rising sense on alienation among Hong Kong’s younger generation regarding China’s affairs has left them disinterested in holding the city’s government to account, thus local media also fails to do so.

This was the explanation put forward by columnist and former Ming Pao deputy editor Chip Tsao as he debated the state of Hong Kong’s press during a club lunch on the topic on June 7.

Asked by a reporter from the Financial Times why the Hong Kong government was not heavily questioned by the media after billionaire businessman Xiao Jianhua was abducted by Chinese officials from the Four Seasons Hotel in Central in February, Tsao said young people see incidents such as this as a ‘fight between a few big brothers’ and that the media then fails to follow up on these stories.

Also on the panel were Daisy Li, Chief Editor of Citizen News and former Chief Executive of the online news division of Apple Daily, Taiwan; and Shirley Yam, South China Morning Post columnist and vice chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. When asked whether they thought press freedom in Hong Kong had been eroded since the Handover in 1997, all panelists agreed it had.

The discussion covered the issue of censorship and self-censorship in the Hong Kong press, with Li recounting how a chief editor of a mainstream news organisation had told her she got daily phone calls from China’s liaison office in Hong Kong ‘telling her what to report or the line to take for tomorrow’s story’. The panel agreed that Hong Kong’s media was the victim of both censorship (from Central Government) and self-censorship, in that editors often second-guessed as to what their news organisation’s management wanted.

Watch the Periscope broadcast of the debate here

Yam, a columnist with SCMP for more than 10 years, expanded on the position of Hong Kong’s most read English-language newspaper since it was bought by Chinese tech firm Alibaba in December 2015.

She said: “I can quote what they said in a meeting to the staff. The role of the Post is to tell the China story to the world. Our target audience are the English-speaking audience, full stop… So they need someone who can speak the language… to tell the story that a foreigner can understand. I can see morning Post is happily taking up this role to tell the China story.” She added that she predicts other local media will begin to do the same.