As Apec host, China can show the world a more open side
Curtis Chin says with growing concern about press freedom in much of Asia, Beijing has a chance, as host of this year's Apec forum, to reveal to the world a more transparent side. It can start by improving how it deals with the media
When the Hong Kong government tersely announced this week that the central government had decided to change the location and timing of a key meeting of Apec finance ministers from Hong Kong to Beijing this September, the rumours began to fly.
Beijing, some speculated, might have been worried about the potential for protests during the high-profile meeting. Others saw it as a sign of the ongoing gradual erosion of Hong Kong's special status and role as China's premier international financial hub. After all, Beijing's change of mind comes just five months after it had agreed to let Hong Kong, still touted as Asia's "world city", run the event. That, though, was before debate had intensified in the special administrative region over necessary electoral reforms to bring about universal suffrage in 2017.
Whatever the full reason, though, the revoking of Hong Kong's chance to host the ministerial-level meeting does not bode well for the call for greater transparency and openness in the overall Apec process under China's reins, including full and robust coverage of all decisions related to the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum.
Recent protests in Hong Kong had already drawn attention to eroding press freedoms. Still, the city is not alone in what is shaping up to be a year of living dangerously for the media in Asia, particularly in China.
In one example, a New York Times journalist, Austin Ramzy, was forced to leave China in January, ostensibly for visa reasons - but perhaps more as a pointed signal to others who report too freely on issues such as corruption - and China continues to imprison more than 30 local reporters, editors and bloggers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Elsewhere in Asia, this month, local journalist Suon Chan was killed in Cambodia after having reported on illegal fishing activities near his village. Another veteran journalist and filmmaker working on a film on the Khmer Rouge has gone missing. In the Philippines, justice has yet to be fully served in the more than 70 cases of murdered journalists since 1992.