Hong Kong: phone survey and the Obscene Articles Tribunal

Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth writes:

At just past 9pm last night, my home telephone rang. I picked it up and it was the Oriental Daily automated computer interviewer asking me about my opinions with respect to the Obscene Articles Tribunal. Yeah! This was my first time as a respondent to a media-sponsored telephone survey in Hong Kong after more than four years. I am just as representative as any other Hong Kong citizen. So I gladly pressed the buttons. Here are the results:

ESWN (and scroll down): Hong Kong By The Numbers (#065)

Hong Hong: Oiwan Lam, Obscene Articles Tribunal, TELA and Cupid and Psyche

Hong Kong's official
search for
unseemly
images
continues apace:

Cupid and Psyche
by François Gérard, 1798
in the Louvre, Paris.

Yesterday, Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) officers patrolling the Hong Kong Book Fair issued an "advice" that a book -- Love Mythology -- be withdrawn. Why? The book's cover (above) made the TELA officers uncomfortable.

Soon after Chinese-language newspaper reporters got hold of the story, however, TELA withdrew its advice

Meanwhile, after a complaint to TELA which was then passed on to Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal, Oiwan Lam is being legally pursued for publishing a photo on her website.

Now, Oiwan Lam has a self-introduction and case briefing: interlocals

Not sure about the clarion call Free Oiwan Lam! As of this writing, Lam is free. That said, it is not a pleasant experience having a legal cloud of unknowing cast a major shadow over one's life.

Other than that, Mister Bijou is also reminded of one graffiti of the Free (fill in the blank)! variety which used to grace the wall of building in Crouch End, London, in the 1970s where one wag had added: with every packet of cornflakes!

Isn't it odd what one remembers?

Anyway, check out Oiwan in: interlocals

Hong Kong: Oiwan Lam update

Rebecca MacKinnon (see biography) provides a useful roundup of the latest and ongoing manoeuvre at internet censorship in Hong Kong: Oiwan update: BBC interview, HK Govt double-standards & Flickr petition

Well worth a read and some links that are mighty profitable to follow. Including this one to Hong Kong's Family Planning Association. Be warned, it's totally surreal (Flash required, no pun intended): famplan

As concerns the Yahoo!-owned photo website Flickr, the situation is a tad confusing . . .

According to Flickr, people uploading photos to the site can (if they wish) moderate who can view content using the following three filters:

Safe - Content suitable for a global, public audience
Moderate - If you're not sure whether your content is suitable for a global, public audience but you think that it doesn't need to be restricted per se, this category is for you
Restricted - This is content you probably wouldn't show to your mum, and definitely shouldn't be seen by kids

Fair enough.

However,

If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off.

Only able to view "safe content"? Local terms of service? WTF?

Bah-humbug! By way of scientific enquiry, Mister Bijou did a Flickr search with "nude" as tag. Evidently, a lot of people do not set any filter on their own content: et voilà!

[Oh, by the way, linking to those photos may be illegal, based on a recent court case in Hong Kong]

Whatever. Even so, it is troubling that Flickr has decided that content on their website which their users deemed moderate or restricted is definitely off-limits hereabouts, even if you sign in: moderate/restricted

On 11 May 2007, Oiwan Lam posted an essay on one of Hong Kong's predominantly Chinese-language, community-oriented forums: InMediaHK.

Lam's essay about the state of censorship in Hong Kong included a photograph (left).

The photo was hot-linked from one of the world's biggest user-generated websites for photos: Flickr.

A week after Lam posted her essay and the photograph, she received a phone call from someone at Hong Kong's Television and Entertainment Authority advising her that it had received "one and only one" complaint and the photo was problematic.

Lam chose to maintain the photo and essay, See here: InMediaHK

Meanwhile, until mid-June, that photo was freely accessible at Flickr. In mid-June, Flickr began limiting access to certain tagged photos for web surfers in four regions: Germany, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong. Why those four? Who knows. Photo: joerrorr at flickr

Fast forward to end of June. Oiwan Lam has now been informed her essay has been classified on a preliminary basis as "Category II: Indecent" by the Hong Kong Obscene Articles Tribunal. The maximum penalty is HK$400,000 and 12 months in jail.

What"s going on? The Obscene Articles Tribunal is harassing citizens -- an interview with Oiwan Lam, by Ip Iam-chong. (1 July 2007: InMediaHK

English translation of Oiwan Lam interview, courtesy of Roland Soong at EastSouthWestNorth

Hong Kong: Obscene Articles Tribunal + Society for Truth and Light

How Did The Obscene Articles Tribunal Get Hijacked? By Leung Man-tao (梁文道), posted 24 May 2007 at InMediaHK. English translation courtesy of ESWN

Hong Kong: Indecent Material?

So, is it indecent material? Is it material which should carry a warning and be kept away from the inquisitive eyes of under-18s?

Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal says so.

And what happens if someone else repeats the 'crime'? As Roland Soong points out:

. . . I am reproducing material that has already been classified as Category II Indecent. As such, I face a maximum penalty of HK$400,000 and 12 months in jail.

Soong also notes, given a recent case where the Obscene Articles Tribunal fined someone for merely linking to another site:

WARNING: If you even so much as hyperlink to this page, you will run the same risk

Hyperlink to material already classified as Category Indecent II: ESWN

Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal

Mervyn Cheung Man-ping, one of the adjudicators of the Hong Kong's Obscene Publications Tribunal, is more than ready to talk to journalists and reporters.

Wow, is he ready: The Very Public Adjudicators of the Hong Kong Obscene Articles Tribunal

Lamentably, however, digging around via Google does not reveal much more (in English) about Cheung. Except he is chairman of something called Hong Kong Education Policy Concern Organisation. That's according to this report first published in scmp on 16 April 2007.

Oh, Mr Cheung is/was (?) also on the board of something called Hong Kong Women Teachers' Organization What's a man doing as leading member of a professional women's organisation? Go figure.

Another adjudicator of the Obscene Articles Tribunal is Choi Chi-sum. Choi is better known as secretary general of the homophobic Society for Truth and Light.

Set up just before the handover in 1997, Society for Truth and Light is a lobby group. It lobbies for "Christian values". STL shares the same values as conservative right-wing Christians in the US and has adopted their organisational style and methodology. STL had 13 full-time staff, according to this scmp report in October 2005.

So what does STL do? Publicly, STL presents position papers to LegCo and lobbied (unsuccessfully) against laws that promulgate equality regardless of sexual preference. STL also conducts surveys about media, youth and sex. And Choi or another spokesperson can usually be relied upon by journalists to furnish at least one quotable soundbyte.

Hong Kong Education Policy Concern Organisation and The Society for Truth and Light, two lobby groups with one aim? Who knows. But Cheung and Choi are both adjudicators for the Obscene Articles Tribunal.

And there is no way of knowing if either or both were sitting when OAT recently declared Chinese University Student Press guilty of publishing an "obscene" survey.

Neither is there any way of knowing if Cheung or Choi (or both) were sitting on the tribunal a couple of weeks ago when a man was found guilty by OAT and fined HK$5,000 for providing links to images in an adult forum. Yes, that's right. Not pictures. Links. Just to be clear: providing a link is now judged as being legally actionable and punishable. This is a very worrisome development.

Cheung and Choi? Instinct tells Mister Bijou that Cheung and Choi share more than meets the eye.

Hong Kong Copy News: Goat

Sex, violence, bestiality, incest, Obscene Articles Tribunal, the Bible, Tiananmen, hyperlinks?

Yes! The new-look Hong Kong Copy News reviews this past week: goat

Hong Kong: Sex and the City

Fighting fire with fire, culture war hots up in Hong Kong:

(SCMP) More than 1,400 indecency complaints have been filed against the Bible -- nearly 10 times more than those lodged against the Chinese University student journal. The Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority yesterday confirmed 1,406 complaints were received and two of the complaints were made by phone and fax. The rest were filed by e-mail. About 168 complaints have been filed against the university's Student Press.

A Chinese-language website www.truthbible.net, which has launched a campaign demanding a reclassification of the Bible, has stopped transferring complaints to the authority automatically after complaint numbers jumped to 11,660. "The website has been disrupted with the intention of discrediting our credibility. We do not rule out the possibility of reporting the case to police to find out the guilty party who tries to suppress freedom of speech," a statement issued in the website said.

The website said the Bible was full of stories and references to incest, rape, cannibalism and violence. Therefore, it should be classified as indecent or obscene.

More, much more at: EastSouthWestNorth