Chinese internet giant Alibaba’s purchase of one of Asia’s great newspapers, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP), should be a cause for concern for all who value an independent press. While Alibaba executive vice chairman Joseph Tsai claimed that the company would continue to allow the SCMP editors to “make their judgment on what to publish and not to publish,” others were not so sure.
Former SCMP editor Willy Lam, a stellar journalist known for his insightful reporting on the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party leadership during his time at the newspaper before his dismissal, was quoted as stating that an Alibaba takeover would likely exacerbate a trend at the paper toward self-censorship on sensitive political issues. And Alibaba spokesperson Tsai himself, in commenting on the SCMP takeover, added that, “Today when I see mainstream western news organizations cover China, they cover it through a very particular lens. It is through the lens that China is a communist state and everything kind of follows from that. A lot of journalists working with these western media organizations may not agree with the system of governance in China and that taints their view of coverage.”
Alibaba’s colorful and ambitious executive chairman Jack Ma is known as a team player with those in the Chinese Communist Party establishment. He and others in his inner circle advocate for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” of Beijing as a rising power on the world stage. They seek to use the internet resources and social media which they financially control to project the virtues of Communist China while downplaying the “ideological and biased” criticisms of the West on such contentious issues as Beijing’s human rights record. As money talks, it seems highly likely that the new owners’s pre-conceptions will soon seep into not only the paper’s editorial pages, but perhaps even into its reporting.
The South China Morning Post, founded in 1903, is Hong Kong’s own “gray lady.” The English-language paper has long been renowned for its award-winning reporting and insightful analysis of China through a century of turmoil, including during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and last year’s “Occupy Central,” the aborted grassroots democracy movement in Hong Kong.
The slow editorial demise of a once-proud newspaper began even before the reversion of Britain’s Crown Colony of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The paper was purchased by ethnic Chinese Malaysian business tycoon Robert Kuok’s Kerry Media in October 1993. Kuok and his family had extensive commercial investments in mainland China and soon gave clear indications of an aversion to editorial positions which might be unnerving to Beijing. The decision by SCMP to cancel cartoonist Larry Feign’s popular comic strip The World of Lily Wong in May 1995, following a series of cartoons on the subject of organ harvests from Chinese prisoners, gained international notoriety as the Hong Kong reversion date approached. And the subsequent dismissal of political satirist Nury Vittachi from the staff of SCMP at the time of the 1997 reversion was clearly an act of political self-censorship by the paper.
The U.S. Congress itself provided the stage for one of SCMP’s most blatant purges of its professional staff. In May 2002, while on his way to appear at a Congressional hearing on North Korea, SCMP Beijing Bureau Chief Jasper Becker was unceremoniously fired. Becker, famed for his work on the massive famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (1996), had long been a thorn in Beijing’s side.
Another purge of the SCMP’s editorial staff took place this past May, when columnists Philip Bowring, Steve Vines, Kevin Rafferty and Frank Ching were told that “their services were no longer needed.” SCMP’s current editor-in-chief, Wang Xiangwei, previously worked at the China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the People’s Republic of China. And now Alibaba has acquired the newspaper.
The slow death of a newspaper that once stood as one of the great editorial voices in Asia is an allegory for the slow erosion of freedom in general that some predicted would take place once the red flag flew over Hong Kong. In the two decades after the departure of the British, that dire prediction has, step-by-step, been borne out. Those voices which only last year were calling for electoral reform on the streets of Hong Kong have largely fallen silent. The pledges made in Hong Kong’s Basic Law and under the “one country, two systems” formula are proving to be largely empty. The fear reflected in self-imposed censorship is real. Increasingly in Hong Kong, all one is left to hear are the sounds of silence.
Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute (SAIS) and an adviser to the Poblete Analysis Group.
