Philip Yeung

Opinion | The FCC has behaved like a rude guest, but Hong Kong didn’t need to evict journalist Victor Mallet

Philip Yeung says the Foreign Correspondents’ Club provoked Hong Kong and China when it gave a separatist a public platform. In testing the limits of free speech, the club has contributed to its curtailment, but now is the time for quiet diplomacy to prevail

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Separatist Andy Chan Ho-tin shakes hands with journalist Victor Mallet before his talk at the Foreign Correspondents' Club on August 14. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Philip Yeung

Published: 6:17pm, 8 Oct 2018Updated: 7:10pm, 8 Oct 2018

For Victor Mallet, an award-winning journalist for the Financial Times, things have come full circle. After Hong Kong rejected his visa renewal, he himself has become part of the international news. I feel sorry for him, though I think he deserved a signal of official displeasure, short of rejection, for his role in hosting the Foreign Correspondents’ Club talk by a Hong Kong independence advocate. Making Mallet sweat over the renewal would have been a strong enough message. Hong Kong, as a city beloved by foreign journalists, and China, as a major power, can both afford to be magnanimous.

Even for a journalist as seasoned as Mallet, as soon as the words “freedom of speech” are trotted out, everyone is expected to kowtow to the concept, and nothing can be ruled out of bounds. Liberty becomes licence.

In extending an invitation to the leader of the separatist Hong Kong National Party, the FCC and its executives had temporarily taken leave of their critical faculties. They were breathing life into a dead issue. When you host a talk on a controversial subject, we expect thoughtful analysis and illumination. In this case, however, the topic was as barren as the speaker himself was ignorant. None of us were any wiser for his presence at the talk. It felt more like a provocation than a thoughtful discussion. The FCC, it seems, has courted controversy for controversy’s sake.

Separatist talk has spread to universities in Hong Kong. In September, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University asked a student union to remove independence banners from a democracy wall. Photo: Winson Wong

Now, the FCC has become the club that launched a thousand screams for press freedom, even though the debate has only one unalterable, foregone conclusion: independence for Hong Kong is as impossible as it is illegal. End of debate. The talk was thus staggeringly sterile. All it managed to do was provoke our sovereign and sour the hitherto cordial relationship between the FCC and the host government, which also happens to be the FCC’s landlord.