(January 21, 2006) The dismissal of the Beijing bureau chief of the South China Morning Post has sparked claims of press-freedom restrictions in Hong Kong. While with the Post, Jasper Becker broke stories on corruption in the Three Gorges resettlement operation.

Hong Kong: The dismissal of the Beijing bureau chief of Hong Kong’s leading English newspaper has sparked claims of censorship and restrictions of press freedom in the former British colony. Veteran reporter and acclaimed author Jasper Becker, who held the post of bureau chief for seven years, was sacked from his position at the South China Morning Post on Monday for refusing to work with the paper’s China editor, the daily said. He says his dismissal was an act of ‘self-censorship’ by the paper to appease Beijing and followed his raising of grievances over the Post’s China coverage. The Post rebuked the accusations, saying Becker’s dismissal had nothing to do with his disagreement with the newspaper’s China coverage. He was sacked for his refusal to work under and report to the China editor, Wang Xiangwei, a spokeswoman for the Post said. “This amounts to our eyes in this organization as insubordination. We have a clear and effective reporting line in this organization and there is no place for people who cannot work or refuse to work in this system,” the spokeswoman told CNN. However, Jasper claims that over the past few months, material that could be seen as offending Hong Kong or China was removed from story copy or downplayed. “I felt there was a long list of stories which had become taboo, like Tibet, like Falun Gong, like labor protests – things they’d rather we didn’t cover.” “Instead we were filling the newspaper with bland, harmless stories, and if there was anything sensitive we would run agency copy and sort of try and downplay it,” Becker said.

CNN, January 21, 2006