https://www.bloomberg.com/opin…hong-kong-s-press-freedom
The news that the Chinese government has asked Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to sell some of its media assets including Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post is another potential threat to this teetering bastion of free speech.
The timing looks ominous. As China remakes Hong Kong’s political system to remove the last vestiges of independent opposition, it is simultaneously engaged in an endeavor to make its narrative of events stick. The last thing authorities need is a Chinese-owned news outlet with global reach that continues to question whether, rather than “improving” Hong Kong’s democracy, Beijing is destroying it.
The English-language SCMP has an outsize importance in Hong Kong’s media landscape, having long served as a barometer for the state of a once free-wheeling news industry. Better-selling Chinese language papers such as Apple Daily are the staple source of news for most of the local population and arguably more vital indicators of how liberal the environment for free expression and critical journalism remains. But the SCMP’s international profile and dominance among the city’s professional and expatriate communities ensure that it continues to attract high-profile scrutiny.
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Concerns that the SCMP would take a more compliant editorial stance date back at least to 1993, when Rupert Murdoch sold a controlling interest to the Beijing-friendly Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok. Despite occasional controversies, predictions that the newspaper would soon turn into a pro-Beijing propaganda organ akin to the state-owned China Daily proved wide of the mark. The paper continued, for example, to feature the city’s annual June 4 Tiananmen vigil on its front page year after year — content that would be unheard of in China’s state media. (Disclosure: This writer worked for the SCMP for a decade starting in 1992, and many other alumni have been recruited by international news organizations, including the reporters who broke news on Alibaba’s media sales for the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.)
Those concerns gained a fresh lease of life with the next change of ownership five years ago, which brought the SCMP not only directly into mainland Chinese hands, but into those of a Communist Party member: Jack Ma, co-founder of Hangzhou-based Alibaba. Once again, it proved a false alarm. Alibaba invested significantly in the newspaper, hiring, moving its operations into remodeled new offices, and expanding the digital offering. Individual editorial decisions in the Alibaba era have drawn criticism, and the newspaper has some vociferous pro-establishment columnists. Yet it has continued to function as a journalistic organization in the democratic mold, providing coverage based on newsworthiness rather than political convenience. That contrasts with the mission of media in China’s Communist Party-run society, which as President Xi Jinping has said is to advance the party’s program and protect its authority.
This time, the century-old SCMP may not be so lucky. Jack Ma has fallen out of favor with the party hierarchy, and has largely sunk from public view since regulators pulled what would have been a world-record $35 billion IPO for Alibaba’s Ant unit last November. The government has grown concerned over Alibaba’s influence over public opinion and wants the company to sell some media assets, Coco Liu and Lulu Yilun Chen of Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter. Discussion about selling the SCMP began last year; the buyer is expected to be a Chinese entity, they wrote.
The causes behind Ma’s fall from grace are perhaps manifold and complex; the concern over Alibaba’s media influence may be driven more by an incident in the mainland involving an executive and social media. Yet Alibaba’s ownership of the SCMP has surely not helped his case.
The prospect of a forced sale fits into a pattern of multi-pronged efforts to narrow the scope for unfettered reporting and critical debate in Hong Kong. Jimmy Lai, the 73-year-old publisher of Apple Daily, is in prison pending trial on national security charges. The Hong Kong government has sought to curb the editorial independence of public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, and police arrested a program maker who was investigating a mob attack during the 2019 protests. Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said the government plans to bring in new laws to tackle “fake news,” which critics say would be used to further restrict media freedom.
In attempting to advance Beijing’s narrative, the statements of establishment figures have become increasingly detached from reality. Former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa said last week that Beijing’s electoral reforms weren’t targeted at any camp and would allow more room for political discussion — even as almost the entire group of opposition candidates for last year’s Legislative Council elections (subsequently postponed) faces national security charges, with most remanded in prison.
The SCMP is hardly a radical voice for the pro-democracy lobby. Yet it retains a tradition of independent reporting and critical analysis, and is far more willing to challenge authority than regional peers such as, say, Singapore’s Straits Times. Its op-ed pages reflect a far wider diversity of opinion than China’s party mouthpieces. This, we can surmise, is unhelpful to China’s attempts to convince people that it is “improving” Hong Kong’s electoral system.
If the newspaper has helped to drag Ma deeper into the mire, he deserves sympathy. Alibaba’s ownership broadly respected the journalistic practices in place since the 1997 handover. In case anyone hadn’t noticed, “one country, two systems” isn’t what it used to be. Don’t be surprised if the newspaper’s next owner is less understanding.
