According to an opinion poll conducted in early September 1997, 68 percent of the respondents thought that the news media preferred not to criticize the Chinese government. Only 22 percent thought otherwise. More than 44 percent also said they believed the Hong Kong media had been practicing undue self-censorship. The survey was part of a series of regular polls conducted by the University of Hong Kong's Social Sciences Research Center.
The findings reinforce concerns about self-censorship in China coverage. The latest figures tally with findings of a pre-1997 survey on front-line journalists conducted by the Journalism and Communication Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. About half of the respondents stated that their colleagues had been censoring themselves.
Margaret Harris, an Australian journalist, in her "Eyewitness Account," gives an expatriate's view (but misses one group: the Japanese, truly important expatriates):
"Despite Hong Kong's international-city status, many people, especially the elderly, have had minimal contact with non-Chinese people. This is partly to do with the fact that Hong Kong's non-Chinese people. This is partly to do with the fact that Hong Kong's non-Chinese population make up only 3 percent of the six mission people living there. But it has a lot more to do with the history and culture of the territory. A tacit apartheid has long existed, accepted by both sides because neither wishes to have a lot to do with the other" Harris wrote.
Many Europeans, the British, American, Canadian and Australian expats, never learn or need to use any Cantonese and move between expat ghetto flats, expat schools, offices run by expats and clubs catering to expats. This has changed over the past few years, but slowly enough for those used to this way of life to feel no real pressure.
Immigration figures show the big expat communities - the British, the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians - have all dropped by a thousand or two, but these drops are not nearly as great as the numbers who departed just before and after the handover. The trickle back has almost compensated for the handover-inspired departures.
"There are still around 30,000 Australians here, an equal number of Britons, and even more Americans and Canadians" Harris said.
Many of those who thought they had left Hong Kong forever found they could not settle down in countries they no longer called home. Or they simply found themselves so used to Hong Kong salaries, the earnings they could achieve in their new countries left them in penury.
