Blackout in Hong Kong

When the Chinese mainland fell to the Communists in 1949, the British crown colony of Hong Kong overnight became the biggest news center in the Far East. To British colonial officials, the influx of newsmen was a nuisance. They gave out as little information as possible about any untoward "incidents." Hong Kong, they felt, was a conspicuous testing ground for the dream of peaceful coexistence, and the fewer inflammatory news stories that got out the better.

Last week, after Chinese Communist planes shot down a British airliner (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Britain's officials in Hong Kong characteristically blacked out all news of the attack. As a result, for a full day newspapers all over the world reported only that a British plane had crashed in the China Sea. AIRLINER, 17 ABOARD, DOWN OFF RED CHINA, headlined the New York Times in a small story on page two. The London Daily Express, whose Hong Kong correspondent saw the plane in the water, reported flatly: "Suggestions that the Skymaster was shot down [are backed up by] no evidence . . . whatsoever."

The "evidence" was a tightly and needlessly held secret. First news that the plane was in trouble and on fire was not announced by British officials until three hours after it was radioed to Hong Kong. When survivors of the crash arrived in the colony, policemen wielding nightsticks kept newsmen from talking to them. A U.S. air attache who spent almost two hours with the crew came out of the meeting and announced: "I don't know a thing boys." Appeals to the U.S. consulate for information brought only the reply, "This is a British affair." One reporter who called the police commissioner at 2 a.m. to check a "rumor" that the plane had been shot down was abruptly cut off: "How dare you disturb me?"

Next day British public-relations officers finally announced that there was "some evidence" that the plane had been shot down. The United Press smuggled a Chinese reporter disguised as a coolie into the hospital, where he got the true story --a three-hour beat--from the pilot. An Associated Press correspondent went to a funeral parlor, where he talked the attendant into letting him look at the body of one of the passengers, found she had been killed by gunshots. But the British, who had put a ballistics expert to work checking a shell dug from one survivor's body, still held off announcing the attack.

Last week, after the full story of the attack finally got out, the foreign correspondents in Hong Kong filed a strong protest against the news blackout. The crown colony government replied with an official triple negative: "The government is not prepared to deny that relations with the press cannot be improved."

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