{"id":453,"date":"2018-08-04T22:52:12","date_gmt":"2018-08-05T05:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=453"},"modified":"2025-07-20T22:15:27","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T05:15:27","slug":"an-editor-in-asia-1994","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/an-editor-in-asia-1994\/","title":{"rendered":"An Editor in Asia (1994)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Asiaweek covers Goh Chok Tong<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This piece could be categorized as “history from primary sources,” because\u00a0<\/span><\/i>I researched it while I was still in Hong Kong and had access to the back issues, library and editors of Asiaweek. It’s also about a period in my life. I wrote it for Liberty to explain what it was like to work as a journalist in a country (if you’d call British-ruled Hong Kong a country) there was no First Amendment. It ran in Liberty, July 1994.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u201c<\/span>We don\u2019t have any first amendment to hide behind here,\u201d my editor-in-chief told me. His tone was unmistakable: I was another one of those Americans who had never had to practice journalism in Asia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I was in Hong Kong, a place with a press nearly as free as America\u2019s. But Hong Kong is a speck surrounded by nations that are less free \u2014 some, not free at all. We had to make peace with enough of those jurisdictions if we were to survive as a business.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The publication I worked for in the early 1990s,\u00a0Asiaweek<\/i>, circulated mainly in Southeast Asia. We attempted to practice American-style journalism, and did fairly well at it. Our staff included Americans, Canadians, Filipinos, Indians, New Zealanders, and people from Britain; we employed a Pakistani who had been run out of his country years before, and several Sri Lankans who had fled Colombo. We thought of ourselves as a voice for truth and honesty \u2014 which we were, some of the time. But we had our limits.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 One of the most common:\u00a0don\u2019t insult the head of state.\u00a0<\/i>In Thailand, we could criticize the prime minister, but the king could not be demeaned in any way. If we ran a photo of Bhumibol Adulyadej or his queen, it had to be on the top of the page, and not next to a drug dealer or a punk rocker. Thais are also sensitive about Buddhism.\u00a0The Asian Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/i>was briefly banned in 1990 over a story about errant monks. The Tourism Authority of Thailand asked the police to ban Dow Jones & Co.\u2019s\u00a0Far Eastern Economic Review\u00a0<\/i>for accusing them of cooperating with promoters of sex tours. The cops didn\u2019t bother. Thailand was not so bad. The government, it was said, was harsher on the Thai-language press than the two English dailies or offshore publications like us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In Indonesia, ruled by Suharto \u2014 no first name, just \u201cSuharto\u201d \u2014 for 25 years, we had to be careful not to frontally attack the dictator\u2019s sons and daughter, who have arranged for their rice bowls to be filled by the government toll-road concession and a state monopoly on cloves, which are used in\u00a0kretek\u00a0<\/i>cigarettes. Every big business deal (such as General Motors\u2019 recent $100-million venture to assemble Opel cars) had a Suharto in on it. At my publication we could disclose these questionable connections, and even quote one of the few brave critics, but we could not\u00a0campaign\u00a0<\/i>against the Suharto family.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 There was always a line we could not cross. Powerful men set that line, and sometimes changed it. Officially, the line in Indonesia was that we count not stir up religious and ethnic animosity. We could not inflame the Islamic fundamentalists or make targets of the ethnic Chinese (3% of the population). We could not give a public platform to armed rebels. Indonesia is tougher on the foreign press than Thailand is, but not as bad as it was in the 1980s. Back then, we could not print Chinese characters, even in a photo of a Hong Kong street.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Hong Kong has a free press, and has China\u2019s guarantee that the press will remain free after July 1, 1997. But a lot of people don\u2019t believe that guarantee. China\u2019s impending takeover of Britain\u2019s last major colony already affects what people write and what sources say, especially Chinese who don\u2019t have a foreign passport. It\u2019s not the Chinese way to stick one\u2019s neck out. In Hong Kong there\u2019s the additional worry that somebody could be writing down your name. Maybe after 1997 you\u2019ll lose your job, or your son won\u2019t get into the university. Why chance it?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Many who plan to stay after 1997\u00a0want\u00a0<\/i>China\u2019s promise of \u201cone country, two systems\u201d to work. My employer certainly did. Our company planned to keep our editorial offices in Hong Kong, so we tended to ignore stories that undercut China\u2019s credibility. While I was there, Hong Kong\u2019s lawyers had a long battle over the future composition and jurisdiction of the territory\u2019s supreme court. It was a crucial issue: who was to have final say over a legal dispute in Hong Kong, the \u201cSpecial Administrative Region\u201d of Hong Kong or the government in Beijing? We ignored it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 After Britain appointed Chris Patten governor in 1992, Patten pushed China to agree that more seats in the legislature would be elected by popular vote. (China had agreed to one-third; the rest were to be appointed by the executive, or would represent banks, unions, professional groups, and the like.) We treated the story as a showdown between Britain and China. We did not see a victory over China as crucial to the people of Hong Kong. If we had, we would have given a sympathetic forum to the United Democrats of Hong Kong, the political party that swept the open seats in the colony\u2019s first and only real election in September 1991. Instead, we spent 1992 and 1993 hitting the same story again and again and again:\u00a0China\u2019s economy is booming.\u00a0<\/i>Democracy and human rights, defined in an Asian way, could come later. When I left the magazine, there was a plan to proclaim Deng Xiaoping the Man of the Century.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 This was not censorship; it was groupthink led by the editor-in-chief. But it had its roots in the impermanence of political freedom in Hong Kong and the need to survive in a world without a first amendment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Of course, the first amendment cannot protect you from everything. In the U.S., if you attack an advertiser, it will pull its ads \u2014 count on it. You might not call that censorship because it\u2019s private action, but it does affect your ability to publish what you think.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 And just as America has social taboos (against men holding hands in public, for instance), it has editorial taboos as well, primarily about race, religion, and ethnicity. All American journalists know what these taboos are, and so do their readers. The same is true in Asia, except that there, the taboos (also about race, religion, and national identity, among other things) are often backed up by censors, police, and army officers \u2014 and in places like Sri Lanka, death squads.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In Hong Kong, we editors were under the umbrella of British rule. Most of our readers were not. If we angered the censors in their country, the offending issue could have pages torn out or, more likely, \u201cget stuck\u201d in the post office. We could not afford to have this happen very often, or we\u2019d go out of business.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 My publisher\u2019s stated philosophy was that our only protection was objectivity and integrity. Under the First Amendment, the American press could afford to be irresponsible. We could not. We had to be \u201cfair.\u201d We were not always fair, but were damn sure not to be unfair to the governments of countries where we were vulnerable to political interference.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 We did have an editorial bias\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/span>explicitly pro-free trade and pro-capitalism, and pro-Asia politically and culturally. We liked democracy, but objected to the U.S. trying to push it on a government, like China\u2019s, that didn\u2019t want it. We felt free in editorials to lecture the United States, the British Hong Kong government, and (more gently) the Philippines and Japan; those countries had free presses. We thumbed our noses at totalitarian North Korea and Burma, where we had no circulation and no prospect of getting any, and demanded the release of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi. But we were almost entirely silent about China\u2019s political prisoners, and we never brought up Tibet or promoted the Dalai Lama. We accepted that Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were part of China. We had no circulation in China yet, but we had dreams of it, and hoped to stay in Hong Kong after 1997.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 And of Malaysia and Singapore, our big rice bowls of circulation, we had no real criticisms at all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Unlike Vietnam, Burma, and China, where the state owns the media, in Singapore and Malaysia the press is private. We were permitted to circulate there if we played by the rules. In those countries, the state influences the press through licensing, official-secrets laws, and indirect ownership \u00b7of shares in media companies. For foreign press like us, control is maintained through approval of correspondents\u2019 visas, and occasionally, an outright ban.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 For publications too important to ban, there are other ways. Singapore\u2019s weapon against the foreign press is \u201cgazzetting,\u201d a fixed limit on circulation. You can publish what you like, but if you\u2019re gazzetted, only a handful of people in Singapore can read it. The newsstand copies of gazzetted publications carry stickers with official serial numbers. If your circulation limit is too low, no advertiser who wants to reach a Singapore audience \u2014 the richest in Southeast Asia \u2014 will consider you. Instead, they\u2019ll buy space in the\u00a0Straits Times\u00a0<\/i>(circulation 342,000) or the\u00a0New Paper\u00a0<\/i>(circulation 92,400), both owned by Singapore Press Holdings, which is indirectly controlled by Singapore\u2019s government.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Singapore unleashed gazzetting in 1986-87. It cut\u00a0Time\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>international edition from 18,000 copies a week to 2,000 copies coverage of an opposition member of parliament (at one time the\u00a0only\u00a0<\/i>opposition member).*\u00a0Asiaweek\u00a0<\/i>was cut from 11,000 copies a week to 500 over an article about supposed Communist conspirators detained under the Internal Security Act. (One Singaporean was detained without trial for 23 years under that law.)**\u00a0\u00a0The Asian Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/i>was cut from 5,000 copies a day to 400 when<\/i>it questioned the Singapore government\u2019s motives for setting up a second stock exchange. The\u00a0AWSJ\u00a0<\/i>offered to circulate for free to subscribers; Singapore agreed if it removed its advertising. The\u00a0AWSJ\u00a0<\/i>declined, and pulled out. It continued to be printed in Singapore, but only for non-Singapore markets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0In 1987, Dow Jones & Co.\u2019s<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Far Eastern Economic Review,\u00a0<\/i>also based in Hong Kong, was cut from 9,000 to 500 copies, also because of its coverage of the \u201cCommunist conspiracy\u201d case. (The foreign press didn\u2019t accept that there was a conspiracy.) The<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Review\u00a0<\/i>withdrew from Singapore. The government then authorized a pirate edition, printed with all the copy intact but blank spaces for the ads. The prime minister (now senior minister), Lee Kuan Yew, sued the<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Review\u00a0<\/i>for libel \u2014 in his own courts \u2014 and won.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 At the APEC meeting in Seattle in November 1993, I had a chance to ask Lee\u2019s son, Second Minister for Defense Lee Hsien Loong, about this. He said, \u201cSingapore does not object to foreign correspondents reporting about it in any way they choose to foreign audiences, providing they get their facts right. . . . Their ideological biases do not matter to us. But when foreign-based journals with significant circulations in Singapore start to report on Singapore for a Singapore audience, the government has to take care. We do not want such foreign journals to take sides on domestic political issues.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Singapore argued that its neighbors like Thailand or Indonesia need not worry what the English-language foreign press says, because the publications with influence in those countries were in Thai, or Malay. But in Singapore, English is the language of business. The government had to control the English-language press\u00a0because too many people read it.\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Asiaweek\u00a0<\/span><\/i>toed the line. It had written caustic editorials against the nanny state \u2014 Singapore\u2019s posting a fine for failing to flush a public toilet, etc. These stopped. In a few years,\u00a0Asiaweek\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>restriction was raised to 5,000, then 10,000, then 12,000.\u00a0The Asian Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/i>was banned from covering a visit by President Bush, while the correspondent from the U.S.\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/i>was let in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 At\u00a0The Asian Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/i>accused\u00a0Asiaweek\u00a0<\/i>of sucking up to Singapore.\u00a0But the\u00a0AWSJ\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>boldness was selective. Its editorial page continued to take a bold line against the Chinese government, regularly beating the drums for imprisoned dissident Wei Jingsheng. The editor of the news pages, Urban Lehner, conceded at a forum in Seattle in November 1993 that because of this position, the paper\u2019s circulation might be restricted in Hong Kong after 1997. But in 1992 and early 1993, I did not notice the\u00a0Journal\u00a0<\/i>campaigning for Singapore\u2019s prisoners of conscience. I recall no denunciations of Singapore\u2019s Internal Security Act, its prohibition of TV-satellite dishes (foreign influence), its ban on\u00a0Cosmopolitan\u00a0<\/i>magazine (bad values for Asian women), or its 1992 ban on the sale of chewing gum (too much hassle to clean it off the subway seats).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 For Singapore, gazzetting worked. For a rich city-state like Singapore, full of American business executives, banning\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0The Asian Wall Street Journal\u00a0<\/i>would have been stupid. Restricting circulation worked much better.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The government also kicked out a few correspondents. That sent a message to the new ones \u2014 and their editors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Such a system requires a reminder now and then. One came on August 13, 1992, when agents of Singapore\u2019s Internal Security Department raided the offices of the\u00a0Business Times\u00a0<\/i>(circulation 25,100), a sister paper of the\u00a0Straits Times.\u00a0<\/i>The offense: printing a leaked estimate of the economic growth rate. This was deemed a violation of the Official Secrets Act. The reporter and her editor were questioned at police headquarters. Police searched through the reporter\u2019s notes, her computer\u2019s hard disk, and her diary. The government defended its actions on the grounds that the Gross Domestic Product was a government secret until officially released, and was information that could be used on the stock exchange.***<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In August 1993, Singapore gazzetted\u00a0The Economist,\u00a0<\/i>which had repeatedly mocked the nanny state. The government wrote long letters, and insisted on a right of unedited reply. When it didn\u2019t get that, it limited the London-based magazine to 7,500 circulation, which merely kept it from expanding.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Singapore recently passed a law requiring the private press to print its rebuttals, which it issues in the manner of a headmaster. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong explained his position on his visit to Seattle in November 1993: \u201cFreedom of speech means both ways. You can disagree with me, but I\u2019m in the position of governing Singapore, and if your point of view is going to lead Singapore the wrong way, I\u2019m going to show you up, and embarrass you \u2014 just as you were trying to embarrass me.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Malaysia\u2019s system is similar to Singapore\u2019s, though less sophisticated in its apparatus of control. In 1987 it closed the second-biggest English-language daily paper, the\u00a0Star\u00a0<\/i>(circula- tion 152,000), for articles \u201cprejudicial to national security and public order.\u201d The\u00a0Star\u00a0<\/i>was allowed to reopen five months later, minus some of its best journalists, who had left for Hong Kong.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Asiaweek\u00a0<\/span><\/i>gave Malaysia special treatment, particularly on stories about the \u201cthree Rs\u201d: race, religion, and royals. We would not dare criticize the affirmative-action policy favoring Malays over ethnic Chinese, even though our readers in Malaysia were mostly Chinese. We did not criticize Malaysia for their use of the death penalty for drug smuggling (Malaysia had 17 executions in 1991, mostly for drug offenses), or their law against kissing in public (even your spouse). We never said one word against Islam being the state religion in a country where only 52% are believers, or the policy of forcing all Muslims to be subject to religious courts. We did run a provocative picture in 1992 of some tribal people\u2019s Christian church that had been torn down by government agents. That issue was banned.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Until January 1993 we wrote little about Malaysia\u2019s sultans, a gaggle of rich aristocrats constitutionally immune from prosecution. We had heard about the golf caddy beaten senseless by an arrogant kinglet \u2014 any taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur could tell you about it \u2014 and the sultan who pardoned his son for a murder. The only case we wrote about was the Sultan of Kelantan, who refused to pay import duty on his new Lamborghini.****\u00a0Only after Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad unleashed his own press against the sultans did we join in \u2014 cautiously.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 As in Singapore, the rule in Malaysia was, if the government allowed a debate about a contentious issue, we could cover it. We couldn\u2019t take sides, but we could interview and quote people who did. We could, therefore, give a voice to the opposition, as long as we were careful to be fair to the government.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The problem with this kind of system is that you get accustomed to it. You censor yourself. You don\u2019t know exactly where the line is, so you stay well behind it. You know certain stories are trouble, so you either don\u2019t do them, or you pull the teeth out of them. Why create trouble? Fighting Lee Kuan Yew in a Singapore court means spending tens of thousands of dollars for lawyers, hours of your time, airplane tickets, hotel bills, hassle, and argument. If you\u2019re a correspondent, it means you might get expelled, or not get your visa renewed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 If some foreigner criticizes you for being uncritical, you reply that you are just being fair, because you have \u201cno First Amendment to hide behind.\u201d You point to the stories that you\u00a0do\u00a0<\/i>cover well \u2014 and there are many \u2014 and remind your critic that if you were shut down by Malaysia or Singapore, you could do nothing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 You settle for half a loaf \u2014 or three quarters, or one quarter, or whatever you can get. After a while, you don\u2019t miss what you have lost very much. A few years after your brush with Lee and Mahathir, you find yourself fawning over them. Lee\u2019s criticism of Western democracy becomes the wisdom of a statesman; Mahathir\u2019s idea that environmentalists are stalking horses for Western timber companies is a good Asian point of view. To you, American journalists sound arrogant and shrill, obsessed with human rights, irresponsibly unconcerned with the\u00a0effect\u00a0<\/i>of what they write. They are stirring up discord,\u00b7 dissension, trouble. Asia does not tolerate as much of that, and you have learned not to push your luck.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a9 1994 Bruce Ramsey<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span>Notes:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

*J.B. Jeyaretnam, elected in 1981 as the first opposition member in 15 years. He later fled to the United States.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

**Chia Thye Poh, a former opposition member of parliament, arrested after he and other members of the Socialist Front resigned in protest of official harassment. Chia was released from prison in 1989 but remained under parole until 1998 because he refused to renounce an intention to overthrow the government. Singapore\u2019s ISA is immune from judicial review by a constitutional amendment passed by the ruling People\u2019s Action Party in 1989.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

***Released in September 1993, 14 and a half years into a 18-year sentence, in a vain attempt to persuade the International Olympic Committee to pick Beijing for the 2000 Olympic Games.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

****Sultans were allowed to bring in seven luxury cars duty-free each year, many of which are immediately resold at a profit. This Lamborghini was the sultan\u2019s eighth or ninth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Asiaweek covers Goh Chok Tong \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This piece could be categorized as “history from primary sources,” because\u00a0I researched it while I was still in Hong Kong and had access to the back issues, library and editors of Asiaweek. It’s also about a period in my life. I wrote it for Liberty to explain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-453","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1599,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/453\/revisions\/1599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}