Last week, a Shenzhen district court
sentenced Wang Jianmin, the 62-year-old publisher of Hong Kong-based political
tabloids Multiple Face and New Way Monthly, to five years and
three months in prison. His editor-in-chief, 41-year-old Guo Zhongxiao, received
two years and three months.
Their
crime? Selling magazines in the mainland without state approval.
The sentencing of the two
Hong Kong journalists drew immediate comparison to the abduction of the five
booksellers earlier this year. Events that would have been dismissed as
isolated incidents now look increasingly like a pattern. They form part of a
broader context in which these and future crackdowns on the city’s press
freedom must be analysed.
Yet, did we let the jailed
journalists’ domicile temper our public outrage?
I met Guo five years ago on
social media. At the time, he was a staff editor for the Hong Kong news
magazine Yazhou Zhoukan (or Asia Weekly). His Facebook posts,
alternating between commentaries on Chinese politics and selfies from his
hiking exploits on the MacLehose Trail, caught my eye. In a city where people
were never more than three degrees of separation apart, we quickly became friends.
Every once in a while, ZX –
which was how I addressed him – and I would meet up for lunch to share thoughts
on politics, blogging and digital journalism. A Hubei ( 湖北 ) native, he would speak Putonghua to me and I would
respond in Cantonese. We communicated just fine – only on rare occasions did we
resort to scribbling Chinese characters on restaurant napkins.
ZX was something of an internet celebrity in
China. The blogger-cum-social activist got his big break in 2002 when his blog
article “Shenzhen, who has abandoned you?” went viral on social media in the
mainland. The 10,000-word manifesto, which criticised city officialdom for not
doing enough to maintain Shenzhen’s competitiveness, earned him a meeting with
the mayor. In Chinese politics, that’s about as rare as a hunk of mutton fat
jade.
Using his blogosphere
stardom, ZX went on to co-found Interhoo, an online think tank that advised
government officials on economic policies. In 2003, he was named “Netizen of
the Year” and one of China’s top 10 citizen journalists. His claim to fame
landed him a coveted job offer a year later from the prestigious Asia Weekly
in Hong Kong.
ZX’s success story inspired
me to write a short story titled “Going South”, published in an
English-language anthology in 2012 – roughly a year after we first made our
acquaintance on Facebook. In April that year, I booked him for lunch near his
office in Chai Wan to give him my new book. In return, he gifted me a signed
copy of his book Shenzhen Shuipaoqileni, which was written under an
alias and based on the blog article that had started it all.
It might have been at the
same lunch that ZX told me his plan to leave his job to become editor-in-chief
of two young political tabloids, Multiple Face and New Way Monthly.
After spending eight years cutting his teeth at Asia Weekly, he was
ready to flex his muscles elsewhere.
The two magazines
specialised in exposés on the Communist leadership. The intense power struggles
among rival factions and the often salacious private lives of high-level party
members – the same topics covered ad nauseam by the publishing house operated
by the missing Hong Kong booksellers – made for sensational reading. The
spectacular downfall of erstwhile political superstar Bo Xilai (薄熙來) in early 2012 had further fuelled the demand for
tabloid journalism and played a part in persuading ZX to seek greener pastures.
But ZX’s career change
wasn’t the only move he had in mind. The mainland expatriate had just become a
permanent resident of Hong Kong and could not wait to move back to Shenzhen
with his wife and newborn child to save on housing expenses. His newly minted
Hong Kong ID would allow him to commute between the two cities with relative
ease. Always a sceptic, I reminded him of the risk of living in the mainland
and writing so liberally about it. Still, he was willing to take his chances.
There was a palpable sense of ‘What were they
thinking?’
If life is a gamble, then
my friend had rolled the dice and lost. If he ever thought that writing for a
magazine was less risky than running one, or that a Hong Kong citizen working
on the mainland
enjoys the same relative
immunity as do his Western counterparts, then he had been grossly mistaken.
In May 2014, less than two
years after his move, ZX, along with the magazines’ publisher Wang, was taken
away by Chinese authorities. Upon learning about their disappearances in the
news, I tried contacting my friend by phone and by email but to no avail. I
asked for assistance on social media and reached out to a number of pan-democratic
lawmakers, but nothing came of that either. Pleading with the Hong Kong
government to intervene diplomatically seemed out of the question.
My call for help had
largely fallen on deaf ears. Perhaps the capture of two mainland-born
journalists – who have decidedly mainland-sounding names and who can barely
speak a word of Cantonese, despite their permanent resident status – did not
give the matter a sufficient “nexus” to Hong Kong for local politicians or
journalists’ groups to act.
Or perhaps playing the
dangerous game of tabloid journalism while living on the mainland was so
patently unwise that they were considered “fair game” by mainland authorities.
Among the people I talked to, there was a palpable sense of “What were they thinking?”
It was not the only time
that the domicile of an arrested person mattered in public opinion. The
disappearance of Lui Por, a Shenzhen resident and the first of the five Hong Kong
booksellers to go missing, was a virtual non-event in the local news cycle. The
incident did not gain traction with the media until two months later, when his
Hong Kong-based colleague Lee Po was believed to have been abducted in Hong
Kong by Chinese authorities.
Apathy can also be easily
rationalised. People I approached for help cautioned that making a lot of noise
south of the border might hurt more than help, considering that the accused
were already in Chinese custody and at the mercy of their captors. Besides,
Communist operatives were not known to bow to public pressure in Hong Kong and
it was advisable to let the legal process run its course.
With that, the case faded
into oblivion. In the intervening months, so much had happened in Hong Kong and
abroad that depressed and distracted us: the Occupy Central movement, the rise
of localism, terrorist attacks in Europe, Brexit, Donald Trump. If it weren’t
for the easy comparison to the missing booksellers saga, the journalists’
sentencing last week wouldn’t have even registered a pulse in the press.
ZX is due to be released as
early as the end of this month – he gets credit for the 26 months he has
already served while in detention. When he finally regains his freedom and
somehow manages to make his way back to Hong Kong, I will tell him how
immeasurably sorry I am about his ordeal. I will tell him how utterly absurd it
was for a magazine editor to be convicted for running an illegal business. I
will also tell him what happened to him may just as easily happen to any of us,
and that our collective inaction was short-sighted, if not altogether shameful.
And I hope he can find it within himself to forgive me and all those who have
failed him.
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