The Chief Executive tells power why a free press is imperative for Hong Kong

If it troubles Donald Tsang Yam-kuen to serve two masters, he doesn’t show it. The Chief Executive’s signature bow tie never seems off kilter. He speaks with the confident, lilting cadences of an extinct Imperial British bureaucracy. When he wants to emphasize a point, he doesn’t raise his voice, he whispers. But while Tsang was technically elected to office, he serves at the pleasure of Beijing. That puts him right at the fault line of the Chinese conundrum: how to marry the unpredictable dynamics of a super-charged economy without ceding state control. Tsang steered Hong Kong through the 1998 Asian financial meltdown as financial secretary. And he’s seen what can happen if you run afoul of the populace. As the number two in the Hong Kong government, he had a front row view of the downfall of his predecessor, Tung Chee-hwa. A recent bout of tough headlines over the lack of transparency in political appointments has shrunk Tsang’s approval ratings to an all-time low. But meeting power, Tsang didn’t seem rattled in the least, sitting in the old British governor’s mansion after returning from the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. In fact, he was unusually effervescent. Tsang, who accepted a knighthood from Prince Charles hours before the 1997 handover, was quick to throw a jab at his former colonial overlords, who will host the Olympics in 2012, but probably not as spectacularly or significantly as Beijing. “It’s a very hard act to follow.”

How so?
For China, it’s been waiting for it for over a hundred years. It’s a redemption of all the slurs and everything that comes with an old imperial empire. The sense is that we have come of age. We are mature. We are not aggressive. We are not assertive. We want peace. But we also have a rich history, heritage, the message is quite strong. It was fun.

Anyway, congratulations on the new magazine. If you want to publish something, Hong Kong is the place for it. But then at the end of the day whether they’re going to make money is a different thing. Yours is a highly competitive world and a very competitive market. If it’s not competitive, we’ll make it so. Sometimes to our own disadvantage. Once newspapers compete, they want targets. I shouldn’t use the word targets. They want themes, things to report on, then sometimes they become twisted into targets for attack in order to attract audience and in order to sell papers. But that’s the name of the game.

That’s exactly what I wanted to talk about.
Oh dear.

Is having a free press in Hong Kong important?
It is. The way in which Hong Kong was populated – people fleeing from different parts of the world, either from totalitarian states or from different societies that feel uncomfortable, from all parts of the world coming over here – their common purpose is personal freedom and flexibility and the ability to reach out, the ability to return, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom to criticize. This is part and parcel of the Hong Kong value system, and that is one of the things that makes Hong Kong different from a good part of Asia. And, in fact, it’s part and parcel of why we have a clean government, because we have checks and balances built into the system as a result of it.

“ A BUSINESSMAN CAN ONLY FEEL AT EASE WHEN IT IS A TOTALLY FREE PLACE IN A SENSE THAT THINGS ARE REPORTED FREELY”

You have a lot of news outlets.
It can make life very miserable for people like ourselves, occasionally. But if you want to trade it for something different, then we have to pay for it in some other ways. And I would not wish to make that sort of trade. But for business, it’s most important, you cannot do without it. Businessmen want to know what’s happening in the market, and if you have a restrained press, even if you say, “You get total freedom on reporting on economic issues,” that’s not enough because economics, really, are just part and parcel of the larger politics of a place. So if you have political uncertainty or you have got a highly restrained political system then the economy will certainly be affected. So a businessman can only feel at ease when it’s a totally free place in a sense that things are reported freely, whether about internal matters or external matters.

Is freedom of speech like a muscle that you have to exercise for it to be maintained? It’s legal for example for Falun Gong to protest in Hong Kong. It’s legal for a newspaper to criticize you as the chief executive. If they weren’t doing that, would that press freedom shrink?
No, it won’t shrink because I think it’s already in the DNA of Hong Kong people, it won’t go away. I do not subscribe to the view that it will dissipate and wither away once freedom is not exercised. We have six or seven protests every day, it’s the name of the game.

Would it not be Hong Kong if people were not taking to the streets to air their grievances?
I would hope that I have a day when there are no protests. [Laughs.] I would hope to have that surprise. It’s part and parcel of the economic performance of a place. If things are doing well economically, naturally you find fewer protests. It’s a fact. But even in the best of times, you have people who are less better off than other people. And if you are aggrieved, even if my life is not threatened, I’m not suffering from hunger, I’m not suffering without a home or something, I feel poorer when I compare myself to Li Ka-shing or somebody else, I feel uneasy about it, not that I want communism, I just feel poor and I want to vent my feelings. Or you have also other issues you feel strongly about whether it is conservation, whether it is environment or whether it is gay rights.

What about the local press in Hong Kong? Are you satisfied with their reporting?
If you ask somebody in government whether he’s satisfied with the critical press – come on. [Laughs.] It’s not a question of whether I’m satisfied with it, it’s whether the people are satisfied with it. I’m already in the kitchen. If I cannot stand the heat, then I shouldn’t be here.

What publications do you read every day?
In the morning, I read my lovely paper, the Oriental Daily, my lovely paper the Apple Daily, Ming Pao, South China Morning Post and Sing Tao Daily, that’s before breakfast. After breakfast and after church I read The Economic Journal, The Economic Times, Wen Wei Po, Ta Kung Pao, that’s it. And then I read the cuttings of all these papers before 8:35am. At 8:40am, I have a morning press session, in which the cabinet reviews the press of the day, every day Monday through Friday. For magazines, I read the Economist and I read Time, and I read a couple of Chinese journals as well.

On paper or on the Internet?
Paper. Still in paper form. I just want to make sure that people still buy newspapers, so I read them in the original form. But I do carry my iPhone with me because it has summaries of all the news, to the minute, of Ming Pao, of RTHK [Radio Television Hong Kong], of Yahoo.com. That’s what I read. It’s easy, easy, easy. [Pulls out his iPhone.] If I want to read what happened in Georgia, here it is. So I flip through all of this. Say I want to read Ming Pao … all the nasty things written about me [laughs] – and everybody else for that matter.

Your favorite iPhone app?
The NetNewsWire is one of my favorite items. Then of course I’m a Christian man, a very devout one to some people, so I’ve got a Bible, I have the Roman Catholic calendar, I have all the ways in which it teaches you how to pronounce biblical names in Hebrew. And then I have the daily reading scripture, a Bible section I’ll read for today. I’ve got photographs of my daughter, my granddaughter, in it, hundreds of them. It’s all fun. [Starts flipping through pictures.] This is a ridiculous, obscene picture of my granddaughter, how come she’s so fat?! This is my daughter-in-law. Get a pretty one, get a pretty one. This is a pretty one. [Laughs.]

A lot of big news organizations have decided to make Hong Kong their regional hub. Have any media groups come to you and expressed dissatisfaction with being in Hong Kong or complained of any pressure to curtail their coverage while based in Hong Kong?
In terms of curtailment, not that I’ve heard of at all. Mostly they complain about the difficulty of entering the mainland, but that doesn’t have to do with me, unfortunately. Although we are the same country, I have my immigration system, they have theirs. It’s what one country two systems is all about. We have lost a lot of freelancers who came here attracted by the 1997 handover, that’s true, but then the foreign press consolidated. The International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal-Asia, Far East Economic Review have their bases here, and CNN, Time Warner, all these guys are now headquartered here. It’s not that they are less critical. They are here precisely because they are free to criticize and free to move. Geographically this is the center of Asia. And at the same time, they’ve got visa-free access in and out and they have also an international lifestyle here, which is being sustained. This is perhaps an ideal place for the international press to operate from, and where they still have the advantage of English being used.

Do you feel there is a place in Asia where the press could operate more freely than in Hong Kong?
No. That’s a categorical point. Some can claim equality with us but nobody can surpass us. I’m sure that press freedom in Japan is excellent. Press freedom in, say, the Philippines is excellent. In Korea it’s quite good. The best could equal us but nobody can better us in this.

What would you say to a news organization deciding to base itself in Singapore over Hong Kong?
Well, I’d feel sorry for them. In a sense that they have to travel a bit further away, and, I’m sorry, they are great friends of mine, the Singaporean government, but I think they would feel rather uncomfortable if they suddenly decide to criticize the local government.

That brings me to another question here. Some Hong Kong journalists have felt pressured to exercise self-censorship when writing about China from Hong Kong.
There was a survey of Hong Kong journalists done by the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association last year saying that 60 percent of the journalists thought there was more self-censorship being practiced in Hong Kong since 1997. That’s a function of the growth of nationalism in their own heart, I’m afraid. For Chinese, for us to criticize the motherland is a bit more difficult, that’s all. It’s not that I’m trying to restrain it. I don’t think the editors are trying to do it. It’s from their own heart – the country is growing, why should I criticize it, I need a greater sense of balance. The restraint is natural. I’m not saying it’s not taking place, but it is not something in which we coerce our journalistic friends. Nor is the pressure coming from China. If anything, they are getting more and more liberal in terms of the treatment of journalism in mainland China.

“ FOR CHINESE, FOR US TO CRITICIZE THE MOTHERLAND IS A BIT MORE DIFFICULT, THAT’S ALL. IT’S NOT THAT I AM TRYING TO RESTRAIN IT”

They certainly take a different sort of view on how journalism should be conducted in the mainland. But the same argument can be applied to America. If you tried to criticize the American government going to war in Iraq, it would have been very difficult without incurring the anger and anguish of people.

In your discussions with senior officials in China, does press freedom come up? Are they looking to Hong Kong as a model for liberalizing press freedom on the mainland?
I have lots of other things to discuss. There are a lot more things that I am more concerned about in the mainland, particularly those things that have an impact on Hong Kong, rather than press freedom on the mainland. Particularly knowing it is a difficult and sensitive issue. I don’t have many chances to see my senior leaders. I just have two or three occasions in a year. I must make the most of those occasions.

And Hong Kong has a government that is committed to preserving this environment of press freedom?
It’s a definitive answer, yes, because we believe this is good for us. It’s good for the community, and it’s good for Hong Kong as a whole, particularly for the sustainability of Hong Kong as a global city, as a financial center.