Hong Kong Clamp-Down
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Hong Kong Clamp-Down
May 11, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. When Hong Kong was a British protectorate, the South China Morning Post was a reliable daily source in English for reporting from the Chinese mainland. With the handover back to mainland China in 1997, the Chinese regime promised 50 years of hands off governance -- a capitalist democratic Hong Kong operating parallel to the authoritarian mainland. There are signs, though, that where free press is concerned, the promise was a hollow one. In a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, former Morning Post Beijing Bureau Chief Jasper Becker described an increasingly pro-China slant to the paper, a slant he protested in word and deed before finally being fired. That firing, he wrote, was just the latest in a series of incremental assaults by mainland interests against independent journalism.
JASPER BECKER: For many, many years -- almost a century --Hong Kong's been one of the key crossroads for all kinds of free opinion and for gossip and rumors about what goes on, on mainland China. And after 1997, it became one of the chief objectives of the government in Beijing to try and rein in the Hong Kong press.
BOB GARFIELD: What is the most egregious example of your voice being suppressed as a reporter in Beijing?
JASPER BECKER:Well what happened was not that there was one particular article which I was outraged about. There was a gradual number of small steps which cumulatively added up to a kind of self-censorship. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence which I thought pointed to the Hong Kong-Macao Affairs Authority, which is the mainland organ operating in Hong Kong, of trying to influence and intimidate people on the Post. We were transferred under their supervision last autumn, and they began to issue certain demands -- for instance that all the foreigners working on the mainland be replaced by ethnic Chinese. So I decided -there was a lot of discontent within the paper - and I decided to go along and speak to the editor, and I clearly hit a, a raw nerve, because he then almost immediately began talking about dismissing me.
BOB GARFIELD:Thomas Abraham, your former editor at the Morning Post, in a letter to the Asian Wall Street Journal, describes you as a sort of "Bartleby the Scrivener" character who increasingly refused to cover certain stories, who wanted to write only for the opinion section -- not for the news pages -- and whose journalistic agenda was determined as much by your next book project as by the events of the day. How do you respond to his response?
JASPER BECKER: Well I've found a lot of the things he's said a little bit silly, actually. I mean one of the examples or the key example that he gave was a story about a Falun Gong protest on Tiananmen Square which he said that I had refused to cover. In fact I was away on holiday. Just on the book thing, I've researched 3 books while I've been at the South China Morning Post, and this has normally been encouraged by the paper. You know, my dismissal after 7 years on the paper came after a long series of other people being pushed out of the paper -- you know, the editor, the cartoonist, the China editor, the features editor -- and so you have to see this in the context of a long buildup.
BOB GARFIELD:Well, Mr. Becker, there's no way for On the Media to parse the truth of this situation. Whether you're an insubordinate jerk or whether the [LAUGHTER] South China Morning Post has become a lap dog for the Beijing regime, but tell me please, in general, apart from your particular circumstances, what can you point to that clarifies the issue of threats to what little may remain of the free press in Hong Kong?
JASPER BECKER: Well what they're trying to do is to gradually tone down the coverage to avoid offending anyone, so a lot of stories about Chinese leaders have become blander and blander. The paper, you know, does very little digging up of stories about the repression of Falun Gong. It's becoming more and more reluctant to air the views of people who oppose the Chinese government and is increasingly being, if you look at the editorials on the paper, as increasingly taking a pro-China view.
BOB GARFIELD:The handover of Hong Kong back to China happened in '97. The agreement called for 50 years of non-interference in Hong Kong affairs by the Beijing regime. Let's flash forward to the year 2047 -- will there be a free press in Hong Kong?
JASPER BECKER: No, I think that the free press will move from Hong Kong to Taiwan and to the United States and increasingly the interests of the people who own the newspapers in Hong Kong - the tycoons - will be to align themselves with the mainland. And it's really in the mainland that we're really going to see initiatives to develop the free press, because with what people in Hong Kong are doing at the moment is to - trying to be more Catholic than the pope and to try and-- curry favor as much as possible.
BOB GARFIELD: Jasper Becker is the former Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now cable subscribers in San Francisco and Los Angeles can tune in to the Chinese perspective by way of a new Fox channel -- an English language version of China's state broadcaster, China Central Television. The decision to provide the West Coast with news from Beijing had less to do with serving the public than with striking a deal with the Chinese government. In exchange, Rupert Murdoch received permission to set up an entertainment cable channel in China, and though the new STAR Satellite Channel airs only in Southern China now, the potential to tap eventually into the world's largest TV population was too much to resist. So what will the Chinese see? American style TV of course. The sitcom Joyful Youth has been likened to Friends. There'll be Mandarin takes on the People's Court and America's Most Wanted and plenty of game shows. We spoke to the president of STAR China -- Jamie Davis. He describes a promo spot in which the network's stars shine against a background of Chinese pop. [CHINESE POP SONG UP AND UNDER]
JAMIE DAVIS: We've created this image spot for the channel which has really all of our hosts interacting with each other, so you'll have the judge playing around with a game show host playing around with the cast of Joyful Youth while the logo is slamming into them and they're falling onto it and it's exploding and-- [LAUGHTER] [CHINESE POP SONG UP] We've got sitcoms, we've got dramas, we've got variety shows, we've got talk shows, we have game shows -- really virtually every single type of program that you would expect to see on a general entertainment channel except for we don't have any news on the channel.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's because a Murdoch-owned STAR network already serves China with news, right? With Phoenix.
JAMIE DAVIS:That's exactly right. We already have another channel which we own 38 percent of named Phoenix which does broadcast already into mainland China, and in launching a second channel we took a strategic decision not to compete head on head with Phoenix and instead to try and complement the channel. We're skewing younger, more fun, more -- more like Fox versus what was maybe CBS years ago when they had older-skewing shows and Fox was much younger -- we're taking that similar type of approach.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:You're taking a similar approach but not nearly as far [LAUGHS] as Fox took it in America. I can't imagine that Al Bundy or When Animals Attack would be big hits [LAUGHTER] in China,but there are a number of programs that you're providing that have awfully close American analogs. Joyful Youth has been compared to Friends. You even recruited a local Letterman!
JAMIE DAVIS: Well, I think that what's happened is, is people have been looking for analogies when they're trying to report in America and they've been trying to grasp at things to make it an analogy so people can understand. When you actually look at the programming, they're not that similar. Let's take Joyful Youth for example. The Joyful Youth script and story line is a hundred percent different. Just because it happens to be 3 women living together in an urban environment and they have 3 friends and they hang out together -- that was how the analogy of Friends came in together. The story lines in the scripts are completely different because the story line of Friends would never make sense in China.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So Jamie what you're saying is that Joyful Youth is, is really not so much like Friends but actually a lot more like Laverne & Shirley.
JAMIE DAVIS: [LAUGHS] Well they're not, they're not making beer either. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I wonder -- have you heard the same complaints in China that Fox heard when it began its great rise -- that it was dumbing down TV or turning it from an informational tool to a waste of brain power?
JAMIE DAVIS: We haven't heard that and I would actually say that when I was using the Fox analogy, I wasn't meaning that we were doing things like In Living Color and Married with Children and other things like that. And I still think that was a right thing for Fox to have done -to try and develop a niche - to really establish at a time when they came in against the 3 major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS. We're in a different position where I'm just trying to create actually what would be considered an upscale brand for the masses. When I say "upscale," it's good-looking. It's really hot graphics and everything else. But the content is just plain and simple that everyone can understand and relate to. But you have to remember -- Chinese television while --is dominated by CCTV which is the national broadcaster -- has evolved quite a bit recently. You have very strong provincial cable and satellite networks in all of the provinces. There's, there's almost everything that you'd see here now also on the television in the United -- in China.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Jamie Davis, thank you very much.
JAMIE DAVIS: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jamie Davis is president of STAR China. [MUSIC]
May 11, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. When Hong Kong was a British protectorate, the South China Morning Post was a reliable daily source in English for reporting from the Chinese mainland. With the handover back to mainland China in 1997, the Chinese regime promised 50 years of hands off governance -- a capitalist democratic Hong Kong operating parallel to the authoritarian mainland. There are signs, though, that where free press is concerned, the promise was a hollow one. In a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, former Morning Post Beijing Bureau Chief Jasper Becker described an increasingly pro-China slant to the paper, a slant he protested in word and deed before finally being fired. That firing, he wrote, was just the latest in a series of incremental assaults by mainland interests against independent journalism.
JASPER BECKER: For many, many years -- almost a century --Hong Kong's been one of the key crossroads for all kinds of free opinion and for gossip and rumors about what goes on, on mainland China. And after 1997, it became one of the chief objectives of the government in Beijing to try and rein in the Hong Kong press.
BOB GARFIELD: What is the most egregious example of your voice being suppressed as a reporter in Beijing?
JASPER BECKER:Well what happened was not that there was one particular article which I was outraged about. There was a gradual number of small steps which cumulatively added up to a kind of self-censorship. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence which I thought pointed to the Hong Kong-Macao Affairs Authority, which is the mainland organ operating in Hong Kong, of trying to influence and intimidate people on the Post. We were transferred under their supervision last autumn, and they began to issue certain demands -- for instance that all the foreigners working on the mainland be replaced by ethnic Chinese. So I decided -there was a lot of discontent within the paper - and I decided to go along and speak to the editor, and I clearly hit a, a raw nerve, because he then almost immediately began talking about dismissing me.
BOB GARFIELD:Thomas Abraham, your former editor at the Morning Post, in a letter to the Asian Wall Street Journal, describes you as a sort of "Bartleby the Scrivener" character who increasingly refused to cover certain stories, who wanted to write only for the opinion section -- not for the news pages -- and whose journalistic agenda was determined as much by your next book project as by the events of the day. How do you respond to his response?
JASPER BECKER: Well I've found a lot of the things he's said a little bit silly, actually. I mean one of the examples or the key example that he gave was a story about a Falun Gong protest on Tiananmen Square which he said that I had refused to cover. In fact I was away on holiday. Just on the book thing, I've researched 3 books while I've been at the South China Morning Post, and this has normally been encouraged by the paper. You know, my dismissal after 7 years on the paper came after a long series of other people being pushed out of the paper -- you know, the editor, the cartoonist, the China editor, the features editor -- and so you have to see this in the context of a long buildup.
BOB GARFIELD:Well, Mr. Becker, there's no way for On the Media to parse the truth of this situation. Whether you're an insubordinate jerk or whether the [LAUGHTER] South China Morning Post has become a lap dog for the Beijing regime, but tell me please, in general, apart from your particular circumstances, what can you point to that clarifies the issue of threats to what little may remain of the free press in Hong Kong?
JASPER BECKER: Well what they're trying to do is to gradually tone down the coverage to avoid offending anyone, so a lot of stories about Chinese leaders have become blander and blander. The paper, you know, does very little digging up of stories about the repression of Falun Gong. It's becoming more and more reluctant to air the views of people who oppose the Chinese government and is increasingly being, if you look at the editorials on the paper, as increasingly taking a pro-China view.
BOB GARFIELD:The handover of Hong Kong back to China happened in '97. The agreement called for 50 years of non-interference in Hong Kong affairs by the Beijing regime. Let's flash forward to the year 2047 -- will there be a free press in Hong Kong?
JASPER BECKER: No, I think that the free press will move from Hong Kong to Taiwan and to the United States and increasingly the interests of the people who own the newspapers in Hong Kong - the tycoons - will be to align themselves with the mainland. And it's really in the mainland that we're really going to see initiatives to develop the free press, because with what people in Hong Kong are doing at the moment is to - trying to be more Catholic than the pope and to try and-- curry favor as much as possible.
BOB GARFIELD: Jasper Becker is the former Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now cable subscribers in San Francisco and Los Angeles can tune in to the Chinese perspective by way of a new Fox channel -- an English language version of China's state broadcaster, China Central Television. The decision to provide the West Coast with news from Beijing had less to do with serving the public than with striking a deal with the Chinese government. In exchange, Rupert Murdoch received permission to set up an entertainment cable channel in China, and though the new STAR Satellite Channel airs only in Southern China now, the potential to tap eventually into the world's largest TV population was too much to resist. So what will the Chinese see? American style TV of course. The sitcom Joyful Youth has been likened to Friends. There'll be Mandarin takes on the People's Court and America's Most Wanted and plenty of game shows. We spoke to the president of STAR China -- Jamie Davis. He describes a promo spot in which the network's stars shine against a background of Chinese pop. [CHINESE POP SONG UP AND UNDER]
JAMIE DAVIS: We've created this image spot for the channel which has really all of our hosts interacting with each other, so you'll have the judge playing around with a game show host playing around with the cast of Joyful Youth while the logo is slamming into them and they're falling onto it and it's exploding and-- [LAUGHTER] [CHINESE POP SONG UP] We've got sitcoms, we've got dramas, we've got variety shows, we've got talk shows, we have game shows -- really virtually every single type of program that you would expect to see on a general entertainment channel except for we don't have any news on the channel.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's because a Murdoch-owned STAR network already serves China with news, right? With Phoenix.
JAMIE DAVIS:That's exactly right. We already have another channel which we own 38 percent of named Phoenix which does broadcast already into mainland China, and in launching a second channel we took a strategic decision not to compete head on head with Phoenix and instead to try and complement the channel. We're skewing younger, more fun, more -- more like Fox versus what was maybe CBS years ago when they had older-skewing shows and Fox was much younger -- we're taking that similar type of approach.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:You're taking a similar approach but not nearly as far [LAUGHS] as Fox took it in America. I can't imagine that Al Bundy or When Animals Attack would be big hits [LAUGHTER] in China,but there are a number of programs that you're providing that have awfully close American analogs. Joyful Youth has been compared to Friends. You even recruited a local Letterman!
JAMIE DAVIS: Well, I think that what's happened is, is people have been looking for analogies when they're trying to report in America and they've been trying to grasp at things to make it an analogy so people can understand. When you actually look at the programming, they're not that similar. Let's take Joyful Youth for example. The Joyful Youth script and story line is a hundred percent different. Just because it happens to be 3 women living together in an urban environment and they have 3 friends and they hang out together -- that was how the analogy of Friends came in together. The story lines in the scripts are completely different because the story line of Friends would never make sense in China.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:So Jamie what you're saying is that Joyful Youth is, is really not so much like Friends but actually a lot more like Laverne & Shirley.
JAMIE DAVIS: [LAUGHS] Well they're not, they're not making beer either. [LAUGHS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I wonder -- have you heard the same complaints in China that Fox heard when it began its great rise -- that it was dumbing down TV or turning it from an informational tool to a waste of brain power?
JAMIE DAVIS: We haven't heard that and I would actually say that when I was using the Fox analogy, I wasn't meaning that we were doing things like In Living Color and Married with Children and other things like that. And I still think that was a right thing for Fox to have done -to try and develop a niche - to really establish at a time when they came in against the 3 major networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS. We're in a different position where I'm just trying to create actually what would be considered an upscale brand for the masses. When I say "upscale," it's good-looking. It's really hot graphics and everything else. But the content is just plain and simple that everyone can understand and relate to. But you have to remember -- Chinese television while --is dominated by CCTV which is the national broadcaster -- has evolved quite a bit recently. You have very strong provincial cable and satellite networks in all of the provinces. There's, there's almost everything that you'd see here now also on the television in the United -- in China.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Jamie Davis, thank you very much.
JAMIE DAVIS: Thank you very much.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jamie Davis is president of STAR China. [MUSIC]
Produced by WNYC Studios