Opinion | Hong Kong must remain guiding light for media amid the regional darkness
Philip Bowring says 10 years after the closure of a fearless HK publication, it's vital to maintain our freedoms and remain a hub for regional news, given the controls exerted elsewhere
This weekend about 100 journalists, myself included, from four continents have gathered in Hong Kong to celebrate the life of a once-renowned institution - the Far Eastern Economic Review weekly magazine - that thrived in large part because of the freedoms Hong Kong provided. Those freedoms remain and need to be used to keep Hong Kong as the regional news hub.
It is a decade since the magazine was killed off by the US publisher Dow Jones. The reasons for its death, aged 58, are arguable but surely included the fact that it was in competition for revenue with The Wall Street Journal Asia, the Dow Jones flagship. New York managers' interests prevailed over local ones, in the process leaving a huge hole in Asian regional coverage that has never been filled.
At its peak in the late 1980s, the Review was selling 85,000 copies a week, 80 per cent of them outside Hong Kong and was eagerly awaited, sometimes in trepidation, by political leaders, business figures, academics and a large audience of English-reading professionals around Asia and beyond. It was accustomed to being banned and sued (most notably in Singapore), its correspondents harassed and occasionally jailed. But it wore these wounds with pride.
Its honesty and independence were established through its coverage of the Vietnam war, the Malaysian race riots on 1969, and the disturbances in Hong Kong both in 1966 - the Star Ferry riots - and during the Cultural Revolution.
It quickly became viewed with hostility by governments around the region, not least in Hong Kong. But here, the press remained relatively free while the situation elsewhere in the region was dire; Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia all in the grip of authoritarian regimes, the media being gradually squeezed to death in Singapore, and muzzled in Malaysia and the Philippines.
Hong Kong's separate and peculiar existence not only helped the Review succeed, it also inspired other Hong Kong-based regional publications, including Asia Magazine, The Asian and Asiaweek. In different ways, they brought improved standards of journalism, provided independent media in countries where the local ones were controlled, and encouraged the development of a cadre of Asian journalists who would flourish in their own countries when conditions allowed.
These publications sustained the links between Hong Kong and the English-reading overseas Chinese populations in Southeast Asia, whose leading business figures always looked to Hong Kong as the ultimate refuge for money, freedom of speech and, for many from Indonesia and Burma, refuge for themselves.