Hong Kong has a new media control regime and, get this, it has been introduced unilaterally by the police without the hapless members of the Lam administration daring to utter a single word.

Under the new regime, the police will only give reporting access to media organizations that are registered with the government’s Information Services Department.

At a stroke, this rules out a large number of new media organizations with a strong following but they do not neatly fall into the categories that have been laid down by the bureaucrats. They belong to a new generation of citizen’s journalists, a worldwide trend which is viewed with distaste by all authoritarian governments.

The situation for freelance reporters, even those employed by established media organizations, is also acute because it is in the nature of their job that they may work for more than one outlet and they tend to do so on a casual basis.

Then there’s the problem for journalists working for the overseas media, many of whom are freelancers because in the new world of very tight budgets most media organizations can no longer afford to have full time correspondents overseas. But the problem does not end there because the police have declared that they will only recognize “internationally known” overseas media organizations. Who is going to define what this means? The answer is the police, the born again media specialists on the global media.

Under the system that was summarily brought to an end last week, the police recognized accreditation issued by professional media organisations, namely the Hong Kong Journalists Association and the Hong Kong Photographers Association. This is the kind of system that works perfectly well in democratic countries around the world. And indeed it worked in Hong Kong where the police have failed to produce a single piece of evidence showing that either of these bodies had issued dubious credentials.

However the practise of governments being the sole determiners of who qualifies as reporters is commonplace in dictatorships where control over the media is an essential part of their tool kit. Thus both local and overseas reporters can be subject to a strict control regime, fortified by the threat of taking away their accreditation, thus making it effectively illegal for them to do their jobs.

Hong Kong has yet to travel down the dismal road leading to a full blown dictatorship but the police are making their best efforts to head in this direction.

Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive in Name Only (CENO), is so terrified of the people who run the police that she dare not interfere with their activities or assert the kind of policy control which is supposed to come from the government. The police have become an autonomous operation with direct lines of communication to the people who matter across the border.

As recently as a year ago the CENO solemnly promised that her administration had no intention of introducing a media registry. Yet now it is going to happen, the only difference being that it is under police control and the CENO did not even have a say in its implementation. Nevertheless the new media regime will inevitably apply to the entire business of government.

As ever when moves are made to extinguish flickering remnants of liberty in Hong Kong, they are accompanied by assurances of dying commitment to whichever part of the existing system has found itself in the firing line. In this instance, we have been assured that this will in no way undermine the freedom of expression and freedom of the press clearly set out in Article 27 of the Basic Law.

Yet again reality is starkly different. Every nail that is hammered into the coffin of Hong Kong’s liberty is now laced with the excruciating stench of hypocrisy.

(Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist, writer and broadcaster and runs companies in the food sector. He was the founding editor of ‘Eastern Express’ and founding publisher of ‘Spike’. In London he was an editor at The Observer and in Asia has worked for international publications including, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, BBC, Asia Times and The Independent and, during Hong Kong’s 2019/20 protests, for the Sunday Times. He hosts a weekly television current affairs programme: The Pulse"

Vines' latest book Defying the Dragon – Hong Kong and the world’s largest dictatorship, will be published early next year by Hurst Publishing. He is the author of several books, including: Hong Kong: China’s New Colony, The Years of Living Dangerously - Asia from Crisis to the New Millennium, Market Panic and Food Gurus.)

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