Reporters told to learn the mainland's rules on news
Hong Kong journalists must learn to understand the mainland's rules on operating across the border, an academic warned yesterday.
Ong Yew-kim, a research fellow at Chinese University's Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, said the detention of veteran journalist Ching Cheong showed the central authorities did not have a clear distinction between news information and intelligence, and the roles of a reporter and a spy. 'China is only a partially open country; there's no freedom of the press, many people are persecuted,' Mr Ong said at a seminar organised by the Hong Kong Journalists' Association.
'There must be many conflicts between Hong Kong and China in terms of the way people think and work.'
He described the mainland's Law on the Protection of State Secrets as dubious because anything authorities did not want people to know or had not been disclosed could be classified as state secrets.
Article 2 of the law says state secrets are issues relating to the security and interests of the nation, determined in line with legally defined procedures, the knowledge of which is restricted to defined personnel for a defined period.
Political analyst Johnny Lau Yui-siu said Hong Kong and the mainland had a different definition of news-gathering.
'The central authorities' openness is only limited to the economic level,' he said.
Mr Lau said Hong Kong and the mainland differed in their interpretation of a journalist's job, political issues and the declassification process for state secrets. This led reporters easily into grey areas, he said.
To enable mainland officials to understand that reports were not aimed at endangering state security, Mr Lau suggested reporters establish relationships with them.
China analyst Willy Wo-Lap Lam, who has reported events on the mainland since the late 1970s, said newspapers had to be careful in running information which might be intended to be a smear campaign by the state.
Another veteran reporter on mainland affairs, Poon Siu-to, said local media had been abusing the use of unidentified sources in reporting news from the mainland, a practice he described as irresponsible.
