Global Media Spectacle: News War over Hong Kong

Epilogue: After the Handover

Epilogue After the Handover Hong Kong is a graveyard for political prognosticators. Everybody predicted we’d have a bumpy ride politically but the economy would take care of itself. Exactly the opposite has happened. —Daniel R. Fung, Solicitor General of Hong Kong The real transition is about identity and not sovereignty. —Anson Chan, Chief Secretary of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) The economy, not Beijing, is Hong Kong’s biggest headache. —The Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1998 Recent events suggest that the one country is rapidly subsuming the two systems. —The New York Times, July 1, 1999 Now Hong Kong is China’s, not Britain’s. “Hong Kong loses its uniqueness (after the handover) and will be treated as part of the larger China story,” as Dorinda Elliot of Newsweek prognosticated several days after the fatigue of the “handover hysteria” in 1997. “It will be difficult to keep Hong Kong news alive.” The fact, after one year of power transition, is that news has declined but not disappeared. However, since the anniversary, Hong Kong appears to be fading away rapidly from the world’s news radar, with the Guardian being the only one among the sampled American and British newspapers carrying an anniversary article in the year 2000. Hong Kong turns out to have partly contradicted world journalists in their political and economic predictions, and partly confirmed their perception of the impotence of the new government. In 1997 most media, except those in the People’s Republic of China, were pessimistic about Hong Kong’s political prospects under Chinese rule but confident about its economic prosperity. Since the first anniversary, they have found just the 189 opposite: politically Hong Kong is not as bad as previously envisaged; economically , it has been engulfed in a major financial crisis that sweeps across almost the whole of Asia and almost wrecks world economy. Is this enough to revamp the news paradigms of the world media? (The PRC media must reconcile the reality of economic hardship and declining public confidence in the SAR government with the rhetoric of a more “splendid” Hong Kong in the arms of the motherland.) As the sampled American and British media outlets carry only a few articles on Hong Kong during the second and third anniversary of sovereignty transfer, we shall base the current analysis mainly on the coverage of the first anniversary in 1998. Explaining “the Surprise” The world media find Hong Kong no longer “the Pearl of the Orient,” but a “subdued” place in the midst of an Asian economic meltdown. People are in “no mood to celebrate” the first anniversary of handover; official celebration, BBC News (July 1, 1998) observes, is “gloomy.”1 Even the Chinese official organ, the People’s Daily (July 1, 1998), admits to the “unusualness” of the situation that tests how “Hong Kong people run Hong Kong.” Surprise is a common theme. Table 10.1 summarizes the main stories or features about the handover carried by selected media from the United States, Britain, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from June 30 to July 2, 1998.2 U.S. and British newspapers find that politically Hong Kong “has changed little from colonial days.” Hong Kong is “a less prosperous and confident metropolis than it once was” (Wall Street Journal, July 1), but few of its “worst problems are the fault of Beijing” (Los Angeles Times, July 1). “Defying predictions by experts here and in the West,” the NewYork Times (July 1, 1998) reports, “Beijing has left Hong Kong largely untouched.” The Los Angeles Times even credits China for acting as “a stabilizing force for Hong Kong’s economy.” Although the western media seem to have rehabilitated Beijing’s credibility in some way, their journalistic paradigms—framing the reality through the lenses of western ideology and systems—remain largely intact. In the international “ideological repair shop” (van Ginneken, 1998: 32), foreign journalists appear to have taken three approaches to repair their news paradigms: (a) by limiting the scope of discrepancies between facts and expectations; (b) by explaining away the troubled facts; and (c) by introducing new criteria. LIMITING THE SCOPE OF DISCREPANCIES. Hong Kong is only “better than expected” (BBC News, July 1), but only “the causal observer” will be fooled by the surface impression. Maggie Farley of the Los Angeles Times acknowledges little change in Hong Kong before turning around to say that people on the 190 Epilogue Table...