"(Mainland) China will inevitably stub its roe on the question of press freedom, probably in the area of human rights abuse reporting," said an executive of a leading American news agency, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Taiwan is uniquely qualified as a replacement to Hong Kong as a regional press and information center."
The mainland hampers its own international communications development by restricting the number of English-language publications. The mainland's one English-language paper, China Daily, is edited in Beijing with the pages beamed by satellite for printing in plants around the world. It was founded to give tourist and other visitors to the mainland something to read, the editor once told me.
There had been complaints about the stuffy, propaganda-heavy Beijing Review and China Reconstructs magazines found in every mainland hotel room. Now many foreign newspapers are allowed at international hotels in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere. The weekly Shanghai Star business supplement to the China Daily may soon become a full-fledged daily newspaper. Of course, overnight June 30 to July 1, the mainland will have two more English-language dailies - South China Morning Post and Hong Kong Standard - when Hong Kong is absorbed by the mainland.
At its start several years ago, China Daily staff members received training in programs at the East-West Center in Hawaii and at Columbia University. More recently, the American studies program at Shanghai' Fudan University has invited American journalism educators to instruct new China Daily and Xinhua news agency staff members. Donald Shanor, a veteran Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent and later Columbia University professor, was a recent instructor at Fudan.
But the program of inviting American journalists was junked over few years in the new wave of nationalism and suspicion that Americans were trying to "contain" the mainland and "spread democracy" in the journalism classroom. The program of inviting American journalism professors to China was revived by 1997.
Beijing's decision to curtail instruction by American journalists has been paralleled by its decision to conduct Foreign Ministry press briefings only in Mandarin. Both are steps backward, in my view, but this is a part of Mainland China's pressure all over Asia.
In Tokyo, for example, Xinhua correspondents, who spoke excellent English after postings in New York and Washington, were ordered to complain to Japanese authorities about the fact that press briefings and speeches were only in Japanese and English. The hypersensitive Japanese Foreign Ministry immediately bowed to mainland demands and set up a special additional program of briefings in Mandarin.
For the Hong Kong press scene, clues painting dim expectations range from a recently published official mainland Chinese "dictionary of journalism" to comments by current officials of the British colony and even mainland businessmen about the problem of low-level mainland bureaucrats thirsting to get their hands on Hong Kong affairs.
