Press to exit: Hong Kong’s media arrests

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. More than a billion people live in slums without basic services such as water and electricity infrastructure. Our correspondent visits both Africa's and Europe's largest slums to see the grinding effects of the pandemic on their residents. And if ever you find yourself in the market for a camel in Somaliland, you'd better know how a bargain is struck. We look at an unusual tradition of silenced negotiation that's shifting now that more and more women are doing the negotiating. But first, In Hong Kong yesterday, hundreds of police officers raided the headquarters of Apple Daily, a pro democracy newspaper. They forced journalists out of the newsroom, seized computers and froze company bank accounts. The paper's editor in chief, Ryan Law, was let out of his apartment in handcuffs.

We arrest four men and one woman for the offenses to collusion with the foreign countries and their external elements.

The media company's bosses were arrested for articles that allegedly threatened national security.

So the answer is simple. Do your journalistic work as freely as you like, in accordance with the law, provided you do not conspire or have any intention to break the Hong Kong law.

It was the culmination of months of pressure on the newspaper, which is owned by the billionaire anti government activist Jimmy Lai, himself facing life in prison for his role in a series of anti government protests in 2019. Yesterday's raid sent a chill through a city already worried about dwindling press freedom.

It's been one year since China imposed a National Security Law on Hong Kong which has touched all aspects of society in the city.

Su Lin Wong is a China correspondent for the Economist and is based in Hong Kong.

One really obvious impact has been that the law has restricted press freedom in the city, especially of news outlets critical of China's Communist Party.

And as for Apple Daily, specifically, what exactly is the paper alleged to have done?

So police said that they have counted 30 articles in which the Apple Daily encouraged foreign countries to impose sanctions on Hong Kong or China. And this is viewed to be in violation of the National Security Law from the perspective of the authorities. So the authorities have warned the public against sharing Apple Daily articles online. And yesterday they said, you know, Apple Daily journalists are not normal journalists. And so the rest of the press corps should separate themselves, which is incredibly ominous and threatening. And I guess what they're trying to do is intimidate the rest of Hong Kong's news organizations here and really narrow the scope of press freedom in this city.

And so what will happen with Apple Daily now? Can they keep operating under those kinds of constraints?

So Apple Daily has said in legal documents that they have enough funding to continue until the end of September next year. But they're obviously under a lot of pressure. You know, a lot of their materials have been seized, their bank accounts frozen, and so it's going to be very, very tough for them to continue operating. That having been said, the paper's journalists are determined to continue working for as long as they can. Interestingly, the paper actually increased their press run today to half a million copies. And that's up from their average daily circulation of 80,000 copies. And pro democracy supporters to buy copies today? Some bought several or tens to give to family, friends and neighbours. I notice pro democracy businesses have bought stacks of copies to give out to customers. So it's really a proxy for pro democracy supporters, when many in the pro democracy camp have been intimidated into silence and others have even fled Hong Kong worried about their safety.

But what about that idea of press freedom now? It's not just Apple Daily that's kind of under the thumb of the government at this point.

That's right. So press freedoms are threatened across the board here in the city. Over the past decade, Hong Kong has plummeted from 54th place to 80th place in the world Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, a campaign group. That having been said, the situation in Hong Kong is still not nearly as bad as the situation in mainland China. China ranks fourth from the bottom of the Press Freedom Index at 177th. And Hong Kong also still lacks the mainland's draconian Internet controls. But the political climate has changed dramatically. Editors are now extremely worried about whether the content that they publish might be in breach of the new law. On June 12, we saw anniversary of the outbreak of the pro democracy protests that rocked Hong Kong in 2019, and over 50 cities around the world held rallies to commemorate the anniversary. But not a single major broadcaster in Hong Kong broadcast footage of those rallies because the television stations were worried that that footage might be in breach of the new security law.

So it's not just a matter of active censorship, but self censorship, I suppose, at this point. I mean, what Ultimately, Free Pro Democracy.

Media Outlet, the city's public broadcaster, Radio Television Hong Kong, or rthk, has long boasted an independent minded culture inspired by that of the BBC. But it's very, very clear that the Hong Kong government now wants ITHK on a much tighter leash. Several senior editors have resigned reportedly because of concerns about editorial freedom. And staff have been ordered to delete archived shows from Facebook and YouTube. The South China Morning Post is another interesting example. It's the territory's main English language newspaper. It's always been considered slightly more pro establishment. That having been said, the newspaper still does a lot of critical reporting. They will report on human rights activists in mainland China. They covered the recent Tiananmen Square vigil in Hong Kong that was canceled by the authorities. But when it comes to extremely sensitive stories in the eyes of the Communist Party, at least about say, corruption involving top leaders, former reporters I have spoken to say that there is a certain level of self censorship. So stories about Xinjiang or Taiwan or Hong Kong independence might in the future be very, very hard to find in Hong Kong.

What about yourself? Are you worried about falling foul of the Security Law?

No, I'm not. I do think the situation is different for local news organizations compared with foreign news organizations. When foreign journalists write stories in mainland China that the Communist Party doesn't like, they get expelled at worst. But when local journalists do similar things, they can get extremely long jail sentences. With the direction of Hong Kong increasingly headed towards what is happening in the Mainland, it can be a useful bellwether in trying to understand what the future of Hong Kong may be. And in all likelihood, things will get worse for media companies in Hong Kong. So the central government is reportedly setting up a propaganda department that could implement censorship in similar ways to the way they implement censorship in the mainland. Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Carrie Lam says that officials are mulling a law against so called fake news. Even the most committed journalists recognize now that citizens are becoming more and more disengaged from politics and have less demand for punchy stories because there's a sense now that the Communist Party is going to do what it wants to do.

Thanks very much for joining us. Su Lin.

Thanks very much Jason.

For more analysis like this from our international network of correspondence, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show Notes Foreign.

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The word slum conjures tin roofed shacks sprawling over the mountainsides around Rio de Janeir, or perhaps tent encampments outside Lagos. But slums, simply defined as collections of informal or unregistered housing, can be found in rich cities and countries as well as poor ones. And they take many forms. By their nature, they're hard for authorities to regulate and to manage, and that's never been more true than over the past year or so.

So the pandemic's affected all of us, but the challenge is much greater for people living in slums.

Avantika Chilcotti is an international correspondent at the Economist.

Obviously, if you don't have running water, you don't have formal electricity supplies. Surviving in lockdowns is much more difficult.

And you've been reporting on some of the world's slums. What did you find?

So I went first to Kibera in Nairobi, which is often called Africa's biggest slum. Kibera's the picture of poverty. Huts cobbled together with mud, corrugated iron sheets, rubbish on unpaved roads. It's really, really absolute poverty. And then a few weeks later, I went to Spain. Just outside Madrid is Europe's largest slum. It's called Canada Real. And parts of the slum there, I was just surprised. Look much like any lower middle income neighborhood. So they've got neat concrete houses, cars outside. The only thing that gives away that this is a slum, that gives away that this isn't a legal settlement with basic services, is the fact that all of the electricity posts there were topped with a tangle of wires. People were obviously trying to tap connections. And, you know, from there I started to go to poorer parts of Canada, the parts where you have a huge drug problem. People slumped on the roadside, police on horseback. But the two types of slum were really very different.

When you visited these places, did anyone sort of stand out in your memory?

So I met lots of people, but two that really stuck with me were two young women. And they both just told me how the pandemic's affected them. In Canada Real, I met a woman called dua Akrikez, who's 17. She was in her final year of school, studying really hard and just really wanting to make her way out of the informal settlement. So the first moves were the most difficult because we have to adapt to stay without light. And we felt like we don't have how to charge the mobile phones, we don't have wi fi. And I spoke to Winnie on the phone after my visit to Kenya.

My name is Winnie Muhonja Shakwa. I've been living in Nairobi since I was young because I was born and raised inside Kibera with my parents.

She works multiple jobs. She still lives with her sister's family because she can't save the thousand Kenyan shillings, which is about $9, 30, she needs every month to rent a mud house, which would be for herself and her one year old son.

Everything has been affected by this Covid. I can't say that it has really hit a lot of people can say most of the friends that I have, maybe even the relatives that also have lost their job due to this Covid.

And why has the pandemic had such a particular impact on people in slums?

So of course, the definition of a slum is an informal settlement. And slum dwellers generally work in the informal sector. That means they do stuff like hawking snacks on the roadside, cleaning fancy houses, braiding hair in informal salons, and they don't have any government backstop? The issue was sort of put to me best by Joe Muturi at Slum Dwellers International.

We are a movement of slum dwellers. We are the biggest. The movement of slum dwellers.

It's a network of community groups that work in slums. And we met when I was in Nairobi.

If you look at the densities in the formal settlement, the issue of social distance, number one was out. There's no water to wash, even to drink and cook food out. These are people who are trying to survive to look for food. So the issue of masks sanitisers was a no, no.

And I suppose that government strictures on social distancing and the like don't work very well in slums.

Yeah. So lockdowns and curfews are hugely problematic for people who live on a day to day income. In Nairobi, people who have broken curfews to try to eke out a living, they've been beaten by local police in some cases. You know, things aren't quite so stark in Canada Real. Quite a few people there have some sort of employment. But you know, there's still horrible poverty because there's no proper grocery stores there in the community. There's no formal public transport that's regular in and out of Canada Real. It's blocked off from central Madrid by huge highways, so you can't go get what you need on foot. And it's really hugely isolated, socially isolated and it's difficult to get by if you can't get out.

And what about access to government relief? One might imagine in Spain anyway, in the developed world that the government might be able to step in here.

Yeah. So when I was walking around Canada Real. I did meet a few people who had the ID documents they needed to get some sort of social protection. But the point is that's really not a lot of people. And also the money they get is not nearly enough. But yeah, that is a big contrast to Kibera where really nobody I met at least had ID or any sort of handouts from the government.

And has there been a notable government response to this? They must surely be aware that this is going on. Matters are particularly bad in their slums.

So I think the big change over COVID 19 has been the new emphasis on urban poverty. You know, traditionally policymakers worry about the rural poor who don't have any infrastructure. What's happening now is as governments are realizing that the urban poor people in slums are vulnerable, they're trying to create some sort of urban safety net. They often lack data. But governments are really innovating. So in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, the administrations use satellite imagery to try and find PO neighborhoods. They've identified them by things like housing density, flood risk. I know in Togo, they've managed to register a third of the adult population to a new social assistance program by using television, radio, social media to kind of get the word out there. So poor governments are doing what they can to try and sort of at least make the first steps to acknowledge this informal urban poverty.

So about Duha and Winnie that you spoke to, what about their prospects? Where does this leave them? For now.

So I think what I got from both of them was this shared goal. All they really want is to work hard, make their way out of the slum, and join the formal economy. But it's not an easy thing to do.

I just hope that one day I'll get a chance to get out of Kibera. I'll make more money, and that one will be very helpful. Just relocate to another place which is safer and even more comfortable and even cleaner.

And of course, you know, Dua and Winnie have it hard, but they really are among the lucky ones. Kibera and Canada, real, they're big slums. Policymakers have to think about them. Non profits turn up to do work. Reporters like me turn up to hear their stories. There are a lot of smaller slums which really don't get that attention, which fall under the radar. It's a lot more difficult for them to get help.

Ivantika, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

In 1906, the German government called upon circus director Lorenz Hagenbeck to supply its colonial army in what is now Namibia with a thousand camels. To make sure he got the best deal, Hagenbeck sought out the key players in the camel business, Somalis. But on seeing how the camel traders haggled, Hagenbeck was dumbfounded. He simply couldn't make sense of their secret finger language.

In Somaliland, the ancient ways of buying and selling camels are under threat.

John McDermott is the Economist's chief Africa correspondent.

A combination of female buyers and more transparent practices means that you're less likely to get ripped off when you go down to the market. These humped wonders are a big deal in Somali culture. They are the main livestock export, and they provide delicious milkshakes in the capital of Somaliland, Hargeysa. When I was there recently, on a particularly windy day, I popped down to the market. It's an incredible place. It's noisy, it's chaotic. You've got goats bleating and camels bellowing. And all of these participants in the market, the buyers, the sellers, they're all shouting loudly, saying, my camel's stronger than your camel. Or buy this one, it's got great meat by its ribs. But when it actually comes to buying one, to reaching a price, everything, however, goes silent.

Why? What happens then?

Let's pretend you are the seller and I'm the buyer of the camel. What we would do is we would put our arms together underneath a cloak, often a black cloak, and then we would move our hands in sync with the buyer, suggesting to the seller, using clasps of fingers and knuckles, exactly how much he wanted to pay. And if that wasn't right at first, the seller would manoeuvre it a bit, and on and on and on it goes like a human abacus, these hands are. And eventually they come to a price. The shawl goes off and they shake hands. It's a bit like the economic version of a game called thumb war that I used to play with my dad when I was a kid.

It's a pretty opaque way of settling on a price, isn't it?

It is, and it's been going on for centuries. Somali poets have written about it, explorers have told tales about it. But it's also, as well as a cultural practice, an economic one. There's a concept in economics called asymmetric information, which is a technical term for when some people in a market know things that other people don't, and thus market failures arise. And that's what's going on. Because if you're not under the shoal, so to speak, you're not clear what prices are being paid for camels. So when you take your turn to try and buy one, you may get ripped off, you may get charged a higher price because you don't know what was being paid the last time. That has obviously served these mostly male, mostly powerful camel brokers, and frankly, other people in markets have had enough, and they're insisting that things start to change. And because the camel brokers are coming under pressure, it means more of them are willing to do deals verbally as opposed to under the cloak. It's also helping the others in the market that before, these camel brokers were the only ones that actually knew the prices that the herders back in the rural areas were willing to accept. But nowadays, anyone with a mobile phone and WhatsApp is able to chat to a clan member in the hinterland and say, hey, how much are you selling those camels for in the market.

And you mentioned women earlier. How do they figure into a more modern market for camels?

They're shaking it up in a big way. About half of the market is now staffed by women. Sharia law forbids tactile trading. It forbids a man and a woman who aren't relatives from touching each other. So that has meant if these mail brokers want to do business with a large number of new clients, they have to do it verbally, they have to do it out in the open. So that's another reason why these traditional male sellers are getting the hump.

Thanks very much for your time, John.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Marguerite Howell and Chris Impey. Our sound engineer is Daniel Lloyd Evans, with help this week from Soul Rivers. Our senior producers are Duncan Barber and Sam Colbert. Our producers are Stevie Hertz and William Warren and assistant producer Jason Hoskins, with extra help this week from Rory Galloway Alize Jean Baptiste and John Jo Devlin. We'll all see you back here on Monday.