China/Washington, DC - This question is very close to my heart. China has no press freedom whatsoever. Period. Even though no official censorship exists in Hong Kong, self-censorship, regrettably, has become the norms since my hometown was taken over by China in 1997.

Let me tell you my experiences working in three different Chinese language newspapers in Hong Kong before, during and after the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China.

Before the handover. I made a trip to the U.S. interviewing dissident writer Liu Binyan, New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal, Princeton sinologist Perry Link, National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. and other critics of Beijing. Most of my reports were never published. The interviews with Mr. Liu and Mr. Rosenthal were the only two that got into print, before the chief editor of the paper spiked all the rest. He said that the interviews would not be published because "there's no substance in your story," "readers are not interested in what you're writing," and "there's no news angle in it." He went further to say that had he known I was writing about Mr. Rosenthal, he would never have published it because "no one knows who A.M. Rosenthal is." (*I wrote an article about this episode; see below.)

During the handover. No censor will admit that his reason for killing a story is that he is afraid of, or wants to please, Beijing. He doesn't have to. Instead, a lot of "legitimate" reasons can be used. "Readers aren't interested" has become the mantra of self-censors. That's exactly what the publisher told me about Tibet after I had commissioned an op-ed from Lodi Gyari, the Dalai Lama's representative in Washington.(# Cited in the 1998 US-Hong Kong Policy Act Report, see below.)

After the handover. When I asked Peng Ming-min, the godfather of Taiwan's independence movement, to write an op-ed, the chief editor, fearing that it might violate Beijing's position on national unification, removed the piece at the last minute. In fact, up to this very minute as far as I know, there's no law in Hong Kong forbidding the advocacy of Taiwan independence. Better do it before the masters utter the order of course.

People get the kind of press they deserve, I hate to admit. As long as the consumers in Hong Kong, constantly named as the freest economy on this planet earth, choose to support those media which engage in self-censorship, there's not much individual journalists can do to change the tide and alter the big picture. Self-censoring newspaper owners won't have a firmer backbone as along as their pockets aren't hurt.