"This book examines the Hong Kong media over a 40 year period, focusing in particular on how its newspapers and TV stations have struggled for press freedom under the colonial British administration, as well as Chinese rule. Making full use of newly declassified material, extensive interviews and specific case-studies, it provides an illuminating analysis of the dynamics of political power and its relationship with media censorship. It reveals how the British colonial government repressed the Hong Kong media during the 1960s, and that despite the subsequent acquisition of greater independence and pluralism, press freedom has come under assault once again from Beijing since 1997. Consideration of the changes that took place around the handover of sovereignty includes detailed case-studies of press treatment of the case of a Hong Kong journalist jailed in China, and the coverage of the sensitive topic of the Taiwan presidential election of 2000. Nonetheless, despite the tremendous pressure to conform to the parameters of the new political climate in the wake of regime change, the case is made that not only has the Hong Kong media retained the capacity to exert the democratising influence of non-profit advocacy journalism, but it has succeeded in preserving traits largely lost in British and American journalism with the growth of media consumerism and capitalism." (Publisher description)