SINISTER ROLE FOR CHINA'S NEWS AGENCY

Eric Ellis, Hong Kong

08/17/1993

FOR the past few years Hongkongers have been bopping to a cheeky song titled "Queens Road East". A catchy rhythm from the usual clean-cut songster, the tune seems no different from the hundreds of jingles that crank out of the colony's awesome Canto-pop machine.

But far from being an urban ditty about a tough town as the title suggests, the term Queens Road East conjures up more sinister connotations of spying, subversion and the Red Guards for Hong Kong's freewheeling six million people A big hit in Hong Kong, the song never once mentions what actually is in Queens Road East but everyone knows what the reference means, for this address, opposite that bastion of colonial privilege the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, houses the Hong Kong office of the New China News Agency, or Xinhua as it's more commonly known.

Xinhua - the term is a Mandarin short form for New China - is the unofficial embassy of the People's Republic of China in Hong Kong. (China does not have an official embassy in Hong Kong because to do so would recognise the colony as a diplomatic entity, a notion alien to China's long-held sovereignty obsession.

Shadowing the British colonial administration, Xinhua operates under the thinly-veiled illusion that it is a news agency reporting Hong Kong affairs to Chinese readers.

True, it does have a news reporting function, but as far as conventional news agencies go it is a vastly different animal than anything Reuters, Agence France Press and Associated Press offer.

Indeed Xinhua's brief extends far beyond mere news to trade union liaison, preparing Hong Kong for Communist rule in 1997 and building an alliance of"capitalist and bourgeois forces in opposition to the British".

It seems to have achieved that last task more than adequately by frequently reminding the vocal business lobby here that opposition to Governor Chris Patten's democratic reform proposals would be well received by prospective joint venture partners across the border.

The first noticeable thing about Xinhua Hong Kong is that there seems to be a lot more reporters than there is news, even accounting for the reams of copy about 1997.

Its red granite headquarters in Wanchai house some 700 mainland officials, a modern version of Mao's fishes in the water whose primary journalistic job is to monitor, if not influence, public opinion in the lead-up to 1997 and report to their masters in Beijing.

Second, it is widely held that a lot of these "reporters" seem to have spent long stints in China's Foreign Ministry, not necessarily a conventional background for a journalist.

Then there's the bureau chief, a man called Zhou Nan, who, despite his taste for Shakespeare and his excellent command of English, is said to be virulently anti-colonial and in particular anti-British.

Zhou reportedly has the ear of China's supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, is a career diplomat and is regarded as a hardliner in the hierarchy.

Carrying the rank of Minister in the Chinese Government, Mr Zhou has served at the United Nations, in Tanzania and Pakistan, the latter two former British colonies where he apparently developed his distaste for attitudes British.

He has also served at the Chinese Embassy in London.

Mr Zhou got his first real taste of foreign affairs during the Korean War when he interpreted for Chinese interrogators of allied prisoners of war.

As a Chinese schooled in the revolutionary struggle, Korea is said to have left him with a contempt for the "weakness" of foreigners and disgust at their willingness to capitulate under duress.

He is a mainland Chinese of unprecedented influence in Hong Kong affairs, sitting on the Chinese team that negotiated the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration that hands Hong Kong back to China.

He is a stickler on the Chinese interpretation of that treaty, an area of particular dispute with the British at present.

No-one in Hong Kong is under any allusion what Xinhua's purpose is in the colony.

"I would say Hong Kong people regard Xinhua as a slightly sinister force,"said a British Foreign Office official.

Although Xinhua has in recent years modestly launched itself into Hong Kong's property market it does not seem to go out of its way to promote good relations. Indeed it often presents a more conservative China than is the reality in relatively progressive Beijing.

It is to Queens Road East that the more politicised of Hongkongers come to vent their spleen.

The area around the building, which also billets Xinhua staff, is one of the most tightly policed in the colony.

It is perhaps unfortunate for the mainlanders inside that it is opposite the Happy Valley Racecourse, a venue for the occasional demonstration against China.

Over the years the Xinhua office has been daubed with graffiti, most of it unflattering, splashed with paint, pelted with eggs and rotten tomatoes and harangued with loudspeakers.

In June 1989 Hong Kong witnessed the remarkable sight of anti-Communist slogans being draped on placards from some Xinhua windows.

Numbers of staff rebelled against the Tiananmen Square massacre and joined the protesters banging at Xinhua's doors.

The fracas led to a major tightening of Xinhua procedures.

Xinhua has done its fair share of agitating back.

It fanned the disruption in Hong Kong which culminated in riots during the Cultural Revolution and more recently led the barrage of insults sprayed at"Prostitute Patten" over his democracy reforms.

As 1997 fast approaches, Hong Kong is likely to feel a lot more of Xinhua's effects.