Thursday, December 01, 2005

Propaganda War in HK Warmed up

Today, all but the frontpages of the press in Hong Kong are story about chief Executive, Donald Tsang, gave a 5-minute TV address through the three TV stations (the other three radio stations also broadcasted his speech simultaneously) at the prime time (7:30pm) yesterday (full texts in Chinese , media coverage in English).
Almost the press all said that Tsang emulated George W. Bush, in order to win the support of his democratic proposal probably from elderly and female citizens in a emotional way (TV viewers are generally considered as more emotional than the readers of press). Some of the major Chinese media said Tsang threatened citizen to support him, otherwise they would never have universal suffrage (Apply Daily's story), some of them said the Tsang's first trial of TV address was inexperienced and unsuccessful hereby, some of economic press calculated the cost Tsang's address should take (Tsang's address was free), such as Economic Daily News and Economic Journal, some of them seemed to be more neutral, such as Standard's Tsang makes TV appeal on reforms, and some of pro-Beijing media said Tsang's address gets high marks.
Besides the TV speech Donald Tsang addressed yesterday,HK government officials, even the officials from Beijing also try to influence the possible turn-out of March on Dec. 4th by all means. Oppositely, the democratic camps went on waging their advertising attacks these days. An ad purporting to be a mother who has been caring about universal suffrage since 1980s was paralleled to oppose to the TV address by Donald Tsang, and the Democratic Party of HK called for people to join the march on Sunday (the other one).

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