I am very happy to announce that self-censorship, a phenomenon that has been disturbing the journalistic circle in Hong Kong for many years, is dead. As a matter of fact, it never existed. Let’s be realistic. We should stop calling the sickness “self-censorship” and name it what it really is‹censorship. Front-line journalists seldom censor themselves.…
It was at the end of my year teaching journalism as a Fulbright lecturer at Fudan University in Shanghai, and one of my best students was talking about his future. “I don’t want to go into journalism,” he said. “It’s too depressing. You can’t be a real journalist.” I had been in China for almost…
When Australian journalist Alan Knight started thinking about the impending changes in Hong Kong, he saw a job to be done documenting the attitudes of local and foreign journalists in the soon-to-be former colony. Knight moved to Hong Kong in early 1997 and began producing Dateline: Hong Kong, a Web site devoted to press and…
Two intrepid Chinese women‹one a naturalized American working as a reporter in New York, the other a former Beijing business writer now serving a six-year sentence in a Chinese jail‹have helped define what is at stake for East Asia and the world now that the Hong Kong press is under the formal sway of the…
China Chen Fang BOOK BANNING Aug. 21, 1997 The Communist Party’s propaganda department, the Culture Ministry, and the Press and Publications Administration banned Chen Fang’s 1997 book, Wrath of Heaven: A Mayor’s Severe Crime, for posing a threat to Chinese leadership with its coverage of government corruption. Though a novel, the book describes the infamous…
Two intrepid Chinese women–one a naturalized American working as a reporter in New York, the other a former Beijing business writer now serving a six-year sentence in a Chinese jail–have helped define what is at stake for East Asia and the world now that the Hong Kong press is under the formal sway of the…
When Australian journalist Alan Knight started thinking about the impending changes in Hong Kong, he saw a job to be done documenting the attitudes of local and foreign journalists in the soon-to-be former colony. Knight moved to Hong Kong in early 1997 and began producing Dateline: Hong Kong, a Web site devoted to press and…
CHINA Chen Fang BOOK BANNING Aug. 21, 1997 The Communist Party’s propaganda department, the Culture Ministry, and the Press and Publications Administration banned Chen Fang’s 1997 book, Wrath of Heaven: A Mayor’s Severe Crime, for posing a threat to Chinese leadership with its coverage of government corruption. Though a novel, the book describes the infamous…