Professor Lo and his colleagues studied these developments and won international recognition for their articles. I participated in the editing of two of the academic articles: "Television Coverage of the 1995 Legislative Election in Taiwan: Rise of Cable Television as a Force for Balance in Media Coverage, Ven-hwei Lo, Edward Neilan, and Pu-tsung King. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Vol. 42 Number 3, Summer 1998, Washington D.C. and Dateline Taipei: Foreign Journalists' Coverage of Taiwan's First-Ever Presidential Election, Edward Neilan, Mine-ping Sun, Ven-Hwei Lo, Asian Journal of Communication. Vol. Six, Number 2, 1996.
It was a privilege to be awarded the Wang Ti-Wu Chair Visiting Professorship of Journalism at National Chengchi in 1996 while Professor Lo was Director of the Department of Journalism. Wang was the late President of United Daily News, a mass circulation daily, which was a driving force toward a free press.
There was a time when Hong Kong authorities, including British Colonial functionaries, would scoff at the idea that Taiwan's press was anything but controlled. (1)
Now the shoe is on the other foot and the relative freedom of press establishments in both places are beginning to be altered.
For this reason I have asked Professor Lo to provide some systematic findings on what is going on in Taiwan, what Taiwanese are thinking about Hong Kong after the handover, to balance my own largely anecdotal reporting.
Professor Lo's thoughts in the rest of this chapter are the result of our conversations and his written comments, along with results of a survey he conducted in 1998 (Tables with raw results of the survey are found in the Appendix.)
These figures represent overstatement by the old British Government Information Services for reasons known to them alone. For example, there are now three English-language newspapers that originate in Hong Kong: South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Standard and Asian Wall Street Journal. Others, including the China Daily, publish separate Hong Kong editions.
The AWSJ, through the magic of computers, is geared to handle all of its editing in New York if this became necessary and then printing editions at the half-dozen or so printing plants under contract around the region. This is a standby precaution in case Hong Kong should ban publication for a period, as Singapore has done. So far there has been cause to worry.
