It is worth noting that during that summer of upheaval in Beijing in which foreign reporters and publications were suspect, there was no interference with the transmission of my news and commentary reports from the Kun Lun Hotel. Nor was there any interruption of delivery to the lobby newsstand of the International Herald-Tribune, Asian Wall Street Journal, Hong Kong Standard and South China Morning Post.
A later explanation that the hotel was owned and managed by the State Public Security Bureau made it all the more intriguing.
Vines possessed all the professional and intellectual qualities to make the Eastern Express the newspaper that would make a difference in Hong Kong. Alas, it was not to be. Before long, Vines and the Eastern Express both fell victim to the syndrome of "pressure from upstairs" and self-censorship that began to characterize indelibly the erosion of press freedom in Hong Kong.
Vines recalls: "having been the founding editor of the Eastern Express, a local English-language daily newspaper, I know something about spending time fighting off pressures.
"The proprietors of Eastern Express were the publicly listed Oriental Press Group, controlled by the controversial Ma family. Ma Ching-Kwan, the eldest son of one of the group's founders, was chairman at the time. He ran Hong Kong's biggest newspaper publishing company and was keen to expand it by entering the English-language market. He told me that he had been thinking about this for some time. Thought moved to action when the Australian-turned-American media baron Rupert Murdoch decided to sell his controlling stake in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper. In his often candid way, Mr. Murdoch revealed that he did so because he was worried that some damn fool of a journalist in Hong Kong would publish something in the then colony which would jeopardize his growing business interest in China. (He later, and for exactly the same reasons, threw the BBC off his Star satellite TV station beamed to Mainland China.)"
Vines explained that the buyer of the Murdoch stake was Robert Kuok, a Malaysian Chinese tycoon, who had started dabbling in the media by taking a stake in TVB, the biggest of the local television stations. The Kuok fortune, centered around his Kerry group, was founded on sugar trading, property deals and an established blue-chip connections with the Chinese leadership (his connections with the leaders of his home country were also impeccable).
