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Posts Tagged ‘press-freedom’

Mystery ailment causes nervous breakdowns in catering infrastructure?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on February 19, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Are Hong Kong hotels becoming less reliable, I wonder. Or have we developed a new variation on “cancel culture”?

Forgive a detour. Readers who have been following these diatribes will probably have noticed occasional references to the Scottish bagpipe, an awkward and troublesome instrument which I took up as a post-retirement hobby. In due course I joined a band, as one does, and we were often booked to provide loud music (opinions differ about the melodiousness of the bagpipe, but nobody disputes that the volume is tremendous) for festivities of various kinds, many of which were held in Hong Kong hotels.

Until the whole sequence was interrupted by COVID we must have averaged one gig a month for years. We shook the chandeliers in most of Hong Kong’s bigger hotels, usually for weddings but sometimes for formal dinners. None of these events was cancelled at the last minute due to a technical hitch.

I think the only mechanical problem we ever encountered was a faulty escalator. I expect we could have climbed with it stopped but the bride was not dressed for that sort of thing, so we stood and warbled for a few minutes while hotel staff coaxed the thing back into action.

Another passtime I drifted into was the secretaryship of a club which runs social events for people interested in Scottish culture. I thought this would just involve note-taking and minutes, but it turned out the secretary was also expected to organise two or three events a year. These were generally held in hotels or clubs and involved eating and dancing. Again I can recall no example of an event which had to be cancelled due to a last-minute problem in the host building.

Last year a kind friend invited me to the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association’s annual dinner. Upon my arrival I said, in jest, that I had checked my emails before setting out in case there had been an airconditioner problem. This was soon after the Democratic Party’s annual foodfest and fund-raiser had been cancelled at the last minute for this reason.

This year I was again invited. But two days before the event it was postponed because, we were told, the hotel concerned – the Regal in Causeway Bay – had a problem with water on its busbars. This sounds painful, and apparently led to fluctuations in the power supply.

There are two interesting things about this ailment. One is that it apparently precluded such remedies as changing the date, the menu or the venue. The other is that when a reporter visited the hotel (Were we not expecting this? It’s a journalists’ association for goodness sake) the power supply appeared to be in rude health, the staff assured him that normal service was being provided, and indeed the room where the journalists were supposed to be doing their browsing and sluicing later in the day was full of happy visitors.

This gives rise to a certain scepticism about whether the problem with the Regal’s busbars was entirely and purely a technical matter. Looking at the history of last-minute cancellations there seems to be a common theme. The mention of “fund-raising” turns sane and happy pieces of catering infrastructure into nervous wrecks.

But I fear this just conceals the underlying reality which is political. After all organisations which zealously support the government do not need to fund-raise. They get money thrown at them.

Those which adopt a more – shall we say – impartial approach have a problem. Money from overseas is an obvious no-no. Crowd-funding can be prosecuted as money-laundering unless you get the names and addresses of everyone in the crowd, and who wants to do that? So you think perhaps a dinner, lucky draw, auction …

And at this point the mysterious gremlin strikes, usually at the last minute. One suspects that somewhere behind the scenes people are being treated to small tea gatherings in North Point which conclude with a warning that even revealing that this event has taken place would be a national security offence. They not only have to do what they are told but to make up a cock and bull story to explain it.

This is an undignified way of dealing with the problem. If the government or the police force wish to make it impossible for certain organisations to book a venue they should circulate a list. Then we shall all know where we stand. I do not know why they would wish for this but no doubt the motives involved are impeccably respectable so there is no reason why the whole procedure should not be public.

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What have the Consumer Council and Wall Street Journal in common? Timidity

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

The Consumer Council is a curious creature. It is, according to its ordinance, not a part of the government. It is, though, according to the same ordinance, required to follow any written instruction from the Chief Executive. And it is, of course, governed, so far as the actual council governs anything, by government appointees.

This is not usually relevant to the council’s work, which is to help consumers with individual complaints and publish reports on topics relevant to consumption. The reports are a reliable source of news, though sometimes seem to be trying rather too hard.

Some of the “safety hazards” of which the council warns us are rather remote. A recent survey of bottled drinking water, for example, worried about bromates, chemicals often found in water which has been chemically purified.

Bromates pose a cancer risk. On the other hand if you drink a daily two quarts (or half a gallon) of bottled water at the upper end of the range allowed by food regulations, your lifetime cancer risk goes up by about two in 10,000 (according to the New York State Health Department).

Other risks which agitate the council are rather obvious. A report on beer, for example, warned that consuming large quantities regularly will make you grow fatter. This will not have come as a great shock to the beer-drinking community.

And so to last week, when the Council departed from its usual confident, if nit-picking, tone to engage in a full-court grovel before a mainland company which had complained about a report on bottled water.

The company, Nongfu Spring, is rumoured to be owned by China’s richest man. In view of the hazards attached to being China’s richest man this is probably a malicious report circulated by his enemies. Still, it is a big company, so we may suppose it to be well-connected.

The council had reported that a sample of Nongfu’s mineral water had a bromate content of 3 micrograms per litre, which coincides with the upper limit in the European Union standard for some water products.

It also made some mildly critical comments on the taste and mineral content, and gave the sample four and a half stars (out of five). Clearly this upset Nongfu, but if you want to dispute and downgrade a report you keep off the subjective stuff and go for the science.

In a strongly worded letter the company complained that the EU standard was inappropriate, and the sample tested was not, as the council had supposed, “natural mineral water” nor “purified drinking water”.

Instead it was in a category recognised by mainland food regulations, “natural drinking water” and met the standards required on the mainland for this category. If not offered a correction and apology the company would take “further action”.

It also complained that it was inappropriate to use food standards from outside Hong Kong, and as the water was produced on the mainland, mainland standards should apply.

Following a meeting the council, usually a robust defender of its conclusions, collapsed in a heap, apologising, reclassifying Nongfu’s masterpiece as five stars, and stressing that all the samples it tested were prefectly safe to drink, as indeed it had stated in its original report.

This is disappointing. Firstly it is important and useful that the Consumer Council should be able to consult and use a wide range of standards from outside Hong Kong. There are many matters for which there is no local standard. Also the phrase “mainland food safety standards” produces a little mental crashing of gears, the kind you get from concepts like “truthful Donald Trump”, “Swiss seamanship” or “Hong Kong’s beloved government”. We can do better.

Secondly, water is water. Nongfu Spring’s business model involves fostering confusion on this point. The company’s website offers Drinking Natural Water, Drinking Purified Water, Natural Jokul Mineral Water, Drinking Natural Water (Suitable for children and nursing mothers), Natural Mineral Water (containing lithium), Drinking Natural Spring Water (suitable for tea making), and Natural Mineral Water in three different kinds of bottle (sports caps, glass and zodiac).

Oddly enough there is no product called “natural drinking water” and people who hawk products called “mineral water” should not be surprised if mineral water standards are applied to them. How can we expect the Consumer Council to stand up for consumers if it is too timid to stand up for itself?

Also an unexpected contender for the traditional white feather this week was the Wall Street Journal, which summarily fired a reporter, Selina Cheng, for accepting the post of chairman of the local Journalists’ Association. Ms Cheng said she had been warned against “advocating for press freedom in a place like Hong Kong.”

Is this the real Wall Street Journal, proprietor R. Murdoch, home in New York, safely headquartered in the home of the brave, land of the free? Alas, so it is. Indeed some people have suggested that the WSJ already has one reporter languishing in a communist jail and is reluctant to risk having another in the same plight. Ms Cheng would not, if such a thing came to pass, be the first JA chairperson to see the inside of a prison.

I know US newspapers have a thing about reporters displaying political preferences. But even the WSJ apparently regards advocating for press freedom as acceptable, in places where there is press freedom – an oddly self-defeating condition. Also Mr Murdoch is famously hostile to unions of any kind.

Still. Ms Cheng’s union activities were not likely to clash with her professional work covering the car and energy industries in China. And the WSJ will soon be free from worries about hostility in Hong Kong because it is moving to Singapore.

In response to inquiries the WSJ borrowed a famous line from embattled government departments and refused to discuss individual cases. It also said it was “a fierce and vocal advocate for press freedom in Hong Kong and around the world.” Bullshit. Had chance. Blew it.

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Security chief, red rag, bull … journalists?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »

What is it, one wonders, about Chris Tang, the Secretary for Security, and the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association? Mr Tang, after all, has a lot on his plate. He is responsible for repelling every threat to peace, order and national security in Hong Kong. The latter, we are often told, needs constant alertness and attention. Yet it seems Mr Tang is never too busy to have a go at the HKJA.

The Association is a small voluntary body aiming to serve and protect the interests of people working in journalism. It does the usual things: seminars, workshops, occasional dinners and the odd press release on relevant matters. It has sometimes run a football competition.

Let me declare, if this counts as an interest, that I was a member for many years. When I first arrived in Hong Kong the JA was a bit of an expat hobby. It was founded by two foreigners in the 70s after a scandalous incident in which the Fire Brigade – which in those days, like the police force and for similar reasons, did not welcome press coverage – turned its hoses on the reporters assembled to watch a performance.

In those days people arriving to work in the humbler parts of Hong Kong journalism (I had been recruited by the Standard) did not join the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which regarded people merely writing for local consumption as peasants. You joined the HKJA for the serious stuff and the Press Club for fun.

The Press Club ran a Wanchai bar situated beguilingly between a night club where frustrated rich men could meet mercenary fast ladies, and a motel in which the ensuing relationships could be consummated. Once a year the JA and the Press Club jointly organised a ball, which was what you might call a colourful occasion, both in dress and behaviour.

During the 80s there was a growing culture clash between the two organisations, which led to the HKJA dropping out of the ball and running its own annual fundraising dinner, a more respectable event. The Press Club was rescued from its continuing flirtation with bankruptcy by an unfrocked accountant called Len Dreaver and eventually dropped the Ball. The club closed altogether in 1997 because so many members had left Hong Kong.

After that the HKJA was really the only game in town, unless you could afford the FCC and had a taste for its somewhat expat alcoholic ambience.

During the ensuing 20 years or so I do not remember any particular tension between the HKJA and the Security Branch. There was a period in which I was regularly recruited to do a session on media relations with officers approaching promotion; after each session we of course had some open discussion, and this often featured complaints about inaccurate or intrusive reporting.

I imagine in most places with a free press you would get the same sort of thing. We would then go on to laments about the absence of a complaint mechanism for people upset about their treatment by the media, to which I would reply that we would be quite happy to have a complaints procedure as long as it was modelled on the police one.

This was all good clean fun and embodied the commonsense truism that the relationship between press and police will always involve some conflict because the objectives of the two groups sometimes coincide and sometimes don’t.

This brings us to 2019 when relations understandably became a bit strained. Mr Tang was then in charge of the police. The HKJA, like any journalists’ union worthy of the name, eagerly pressed for access to events and against violence inflicted on its members.

Since that time Mr Tang has resoundingly condemned the association and all its works on several occasions, questioning who it represents, who it gets its money from and whether it should be invited to press conferences on relevant matters. He has accused it of “infiltrating schools” and defending people who swore at policewomen. At one point he suggested the association should publicise its entire membership list, a curious suggestion from a government which condemned the publication of national security judges’ mere names as “doxing”.

This barrage gave the understandable impression, in the context of the times, that the HKJA was expected either to disband itself, like the Professional Teachers Union, or elect a more “patriotic” – or more tactfully “neutral” – leadership, like the Hong Kong Bar Association.

And so to last Friday, when the HKJA elected a new leadership, and Mr Tang rose to the occasion with “Looking at [the list of candidates], it looks more like a foreign journalist association to me. Most of them are journalists from foreign media, some are freelancers, some are not even journalists and their organisations have engaged in political activities.” Mr Tang was disturbed that the executive was light on representatives from local mainstream media.

Actually this has always been a problem, if it is a problem. Many mainstream media proprietors are violently opposed to trade unions generally and particularly to trade unions which seek to represent their employees. The JA leadership has consequently always been a bit overweight on the non-profit-making parts of the media business, like RTHK, and underweight on major media groups in private ownership. Insert the usual suspects here.

One must add that over the last five years or so the mainstream media have much diminished, and are now heavily outnumbered by the directly or indirectly state-owned sector, and the voluntary castrato chorus whose owners like a quiet life.

Many journalists who are still trying to pursue the activity in its traditional form may now feel that their lives are exciting enough without accepting office in an organisation which is clearly in the government’s crosshairs. In fact two members of the executive put in their resignations between the end of nominations and the counting of the votes.

Still, the question who is a journalist seems to be one about which one can think of more reliable sources than Mr Tang. Bernard Levin memorable pondered in one piece whether journalism was an art, a craft, a trade, a confidence trick or a disease. Each of these theories would lead to a different definition but none of them supports the suggestion that entry to the profession should be monitored by a retired policeman.

What seems to me worthy of comment and universally overlooked is that Mr Tang’s preoccupation with the HKJA has apparently led to spying on it. No doubt the identities of the candidates and their professional activities were transmitted to voters. But Mr Tang is, I presume, not an HKJA member so he was not entitled to see them.

Commenting on the antecedents and character of the candidates looks dangerously close to the sort of intimidating letter which concludes with some such phrase as “we know where you live”.

So I salute the incoming executive, who are no doubt well aware that one mis-step could bring them a long encounter with the government’s correctional servants. As Sophie Scholl wrote: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail if there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?”

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We should not be expected to pretend that press freedom has survived recent changes intact

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on May 15, 2024| 4 Comments »

A strange, indeed barely believable, controversy has erupted over a question which appears hardly disputable: whether Hong Kong still enjoys the degree of press freedom that it did before 2020.

Nothing has changed is the official line pushed by official government spokesmen in Beijing, echoed by local gaslighter general Grenville Cross in newspaper pieces. For the opposite view we have Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontiéres or RSF if you are subject to Quebec Province language laws) who are the compilers and curators of the relevant international league table, the World Press Freedom Index.

The message provided by the index is stark. Two decades ago Hong Kong was right up there among the respectable countries to which one might wish to emigrate, at number 18. In 2023 it was number 140 out of 180 countries covered. This year it improved to 138. The compilers gloomily noted that this was not because Hong Kong’s score had improved, but because some others we must now consider rivals had deteriorated.

As a result we have now surpassed South Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia and Lebanon. That is the sort of company in which we now find ourselves.

I realise that compiling tables of this kind is not an exact science. Indicators have to be selected, turned into numbers and aggregated. During this process choices have to be made and different choices will produce different results.

On the other hand it is difficult to believe that any subtle adjustment of the methodology would produce much alleviation of a 120-place drop down the table. People are free to wonder about the details: are we really worse than Bolivia? They may argue that things could be worse. China, after all, sits in place 172 this year, rescued from a lower slot by massive deterioration in Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea.

However the complacency crew prefer simply to ignore all this. They also ignore some rather obvious anecdotal milestones. When the News of the World was caught in criminal mischief its owner, Rupert Murdoch, was summoned to a hearing in the House of Commons. He was not paraded through his newsroom in chains.

When the Hong Kong Standard was found to have fraudulently faked its circulation figures the owner was not prosecuted at all. The explanation, vigorously propagated by Mr Cross in his previous role as a government lawyer, was that such a prosecution might have resulted in the owner, Sally Au Sian, closing the newspaper and putting hundreds of its employees out of work.

The 900 or so journalists and many other workers who have lost their jobs due to the current spate of prosecutions will no doubt wish that this consideration still found favour in the Department of Justice. Mr Cross, like his successors, seems to have discarded it.

I still encounter working journalists from time to time, as well as people who used to be working journalists, and there is a clear consensus in the profession that times have changed. Indeed a common topic of conversation at journalists’ gatherings these days is who will be next for closure, jail or exile.

Perhaps this is too pessimistic. Mr Cross’s argument, shorn of some wolf warrior points about British hypocrisy, rests on two feet. One is that press freedom is protected by the Bill of Rights, the Basic Law, the National Security Law and its local supplement. The other is that large numbers of media organisations still have “a presence” in Hong Kong.

To take the second point first, this is not an indication of anything except, possibly, that Hong Kong is an easier place for journalists than the mainland, hardly a tribute to our “vigourous media scene”. The figure cited is for December of last year, so it does not include recent departures like those of Radio Free Asia and the Asian Wall Street Journal. Also the inclusion of a “public service broadcaster” in the scene hardly does justice to recent changes at RTHK.

But the legal side is Mr Cross’s speciality and here we are perhaps entitled to be most disappointed.

The Bill of Rights Ordinance was a genuine attempt to entrench notions of human rights in the Hong Kong legal system. It failed. Judges, possibly sensing an attempt to lure them into a political minefield, refused to cooperate. Attempts to rely on the newly codified rights were usually rejected on the grounds that the ordinance merely enumerated the rights that were protected under the existing law. The only substantive effect of the ordinance was the deletion of some “reverse onus” arrangements, under which the defendant was in some circumstances required to prove his innocence instead of the usual arrangement under which the prosecution has to prove guilt.

Judges have been equally unreceptive to suggestions that the provisions about rights in the Basic Law should be interpreted as invalidating any existing law which violates those rights. The national security law is, of course, above local supervision and any attempt to limit its purview would be over-ruled by Beijing.

It is a characteristic of legislation that it supersedes whatever was there before it so the local Article 23 legislation is not going to be much help in court either. Hong Kong, in short, has very fine verbal protections for freedom of the press, but they are in practice no help at all. They are like the similar protections in the PRC constitution. The talk is there; the walk is not.

This is regarded as a commonplace item of information outside Hong Kong and the idea that press freedom in the territory has been curtailed neither originated in nor is confined to the British Foreign Office. It is no doubt held with particular enthusiasm by the three freelance journalists who were refused admission last year, as well as the RSF representative who was barred more recently.

It may well be that things could be worse. We do not have prior censorship yet. The number of apps mysteriously absent from the Apple store matches the number in Russia, but not the much higher number in China. I can still write that we do not live on Planet Cross.

It may also be that national security requires sacrifices, and a reduction in the degree of press freedom available is one of them. I wouldn’t dare express an opinion on that. It is not my nation. But cake cannot be simultaneously had and eaten. Maybe the destruction could have been worse. Maybe it was worth it. But we should not be required to pretend it has not happened.

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