A veteran Hong Kong journalist yesterday called for stronger support from Taiwan and the international community over the “ever-worsening” repression of media in the Chinese territory by Beijing and local authorities.
Mak Yin-ting (麥燕庭), correspondent for Radio France Internationale, voiced grave concern over the continual erosion of press freedom in Hong Kong at a Taipei forum, which drew reporters from China, Macau and Malaysia, as well as local activists and academics, to discuss Chinese-language media in Asia.
Although China has guaranteed Hong Kong press freedom as stipulated in Article 27 of the Hong Kong Basic Law, Mak said she expected the territory’s handover in 1997 to result in a raft of restrictive measures.
“What I didn’t expect was that press freedom would have deteriorated at a much faster pace than I thought,” said Mak, former chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalist Association.
Mak said China’s attempts to exert control over the media in Hong Kong since 1997 came in three waves, with Beijing using a variety of measures to tighten the noose on press and media freedom in the wake of the three events.
They were the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the 2003 march against Article 23 of the Basic Law that drew 500,000 people in Hong Kong and the demonstration against the introduction of a mandatory Moral and National Education Curriculum in Hong Kong’s primary and secondary schools in 2012, Mak said.
Beijing’s influence on media outlets in Hong Kong, which has encouraged a culture of self-
censorship, is “close to” stifling the media, which has come under increasing political and commercial sway from the local government, Mak said.
Even multinational financial giants like Standard Charter and HSBC, and international airlines have bowed to pressure from the government not to place ads in certain newspapers, she said.
Mak said she believed that if reporters could stand up against all these moves to suppress media freedom, it would help resist the oppression.
The Hong Kong Journalist Association seldom took part in protests before 2003, but after the July 1 march in 2003, the situation has changed, Mak said.
“We are [now] often involved in the protests,” Mak said.
“People might say that reporters are supposed to be observers, not participants, but we have to stand up and defend press freedom. Once press freedom is restricted, so is the freedom people are entitled to enjoy in society,” she said.
The protests launched by reporters and citizens in opposition to the government-proposed amendment to the Corporation Act last year designed to deny public access to information of executives in a company has successfully stopped the plan, Mak said.
Various proposals to restrict media freedom are still being deliberated in the Legislative Council and the number of harassments and violent attacks on journalists in the territory is on the rise, Mak said, urging Taiwan and the international community to pay close heed to the situation in Hong Kong and support press freedom.
The forum was hosted by the Excellent Journalism Award.
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