Business as usual for Hong Kong?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 15, 1996 by Caitlin Kelly

As of July 1, 1997, Hong Kong will once more become part of China. The ceremony is likely to rival or even surpass the Olympic Games as a media feeding frenzy - some 4,000 to 6,000 journalists from every comer of the globe are expected to attend. The circus has already begun. "I drown in journalists, applications to interview the governor on a daily basis," his spokesman, Kerry McGlynn, recently told the South China Morning Post. But once the circus has left town, the quotidian business of covering Asia will go on. Despite all assurances that, under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the present judicial system will remain unchanged for 50 years, editors and publishers and writers, stateside and in Hong Kong, are already wondering just what all this will mean.

The city of just over six million, tucked between volcanic mountains and Victoria harbor, has been for years an international center for Asian coverage by every medium. Among American magazines, Reader's Digest has been there since 1963 and Time has had a bureau there for more than three decades.

Thanks to superb telecommunications, easy air routes, a large, skilled English-speaking labor force and - despite some draconian press laws on the books - few restrictions on publishing, Hong Kong has been the obvious choice, for some the only choice, for an Asian base. Bangkok suffers horrific traffic and pollution, Singapore has a habit of "gazetting" (sharply curbing pre-issue circulation) periodicals whose take displeases the government; Manila and Kuala Lumpur lack infrastructure; Taiwan and Japan are too expensive.

"The problem is that there's no real good alternative," says Rick Hornik, deputy chief of correspondents for Time and a former Hong Kong bureau chief.

Time recently moved its Asian operations from Manhattan to Hong Kong, including art, photo, research and editing staff. It now has about 15 employees there, Hornik says. The timing "has nothing to do with the hand-over," he notes. "We get a better feel for our readers by being out there. We wanted to become more regionally based." Hornik says Asia's growing middle class is hungry for "world class" journalism, something he says they're still not getting from local sources. (This despite the staggering statistic that Hong Kong has more daily newspapers, 76, than any other city.)

Reader's Digest is relocating its Asian English edition this month to Sydney, Australia. "It has nothing to do with press freedoms," says Lesta Cordil, associate director of corporate communications at the company's headquarters in Pleasantville, New York. The move is designed to save money through economies of scale, she says. The staff of the magazine's Chinese-language edition will stay in Hong Kong. "That we're keeping our Chinese staff there shows we're not overly concerned about it," she says.

Still, even Reader's Digest, hardly a publication known for its contentious editorial stance, has felt the sting of Chinese government disfavor. An article in the January 1996 issue, a profile of a Chinese doctor fighting infanticide, escaped government scrutiny in the Chinese-language edition (circulation 317,000), but was banned when it appeared the next month in the English-language edition, which has 339,000 readers in 15 Asian countries.

The Chinese government banned the Digest's Chinese-language edition twice, Cordil says - a book excerpt from "The Secret Life of Chairman Mao" (April 1995) and "The Future of Hong Kong" (July 1996). The English-language Digest seems to be more scrutinized; it was banned four times between September 1995 and May 1996. One offending issue featured "Taiwan, China's First Democracy."

Will pragmatism or principle win?

Press freedom in Hong Kong post-1997 is likely to depend on a combination of factors: editorial content; the nationality of a publication's staff, whether visas, press accreditation or other bureaucratic concerns are imposed; how the law, as written, is interpreted. Ask a publisher of general-interest magazines - such as George J. Green, president of Hearst Magazines International - and the view is pretty sanguine. With Chinese-language editions of Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Esquire published in Hong Kong for more than a decade, Hearst has "never" had a problem with censorship, Green says. The three magazines are "very Hong Kong, international brands that have a local flavor," he says. Green, who visited Hong Kong in mid-September, feels confident that his books, at least, will continue to fly beneath the radar of Chinese government censors. "We're not in the political arena," he says.

Another reassurance is Hong Kong's determination to keep making money, an attitude Green doubts will change much when the colony becomes a Special Administrative Region. "Hong Kong isn't like anyplace else in the world. It's a free port. They have low taxes. It's very much a business environment. Business is more important than anything else."

Joe Cappo, a fellow member with Green of the Magazine Publishers of America International Committee, thinks publishers of hard news may indeed face a tougher time than others under the new regime. Cappo, who as senior vice president, international, of Chicago-based Crain Communications Inc. oversees 26 publications worldwide, has only one property in Hong Kong, Asian Advertising & Marketing, a licensed version of Advertising Age. Crain has no money invested in the publication and so stands to lose only a source of revenue from the licensing arrangement, Cappo says. But the magazine, which also covers television and magazine industries, might publish pieces that "could strike the government as delicate in some ways," he says.