London  and British Hong Kong, 1940: Colonial Press Censorship

The above quote concluded Cyril Radcliffe’s public broadcast on censorship on New Year’s Eve 1940. Entitled “How the Censorship Works”, Radcliffe, the Controller of the Press & Censorship Division of the Ministry of Information in London, aimed to build public support for censorship in the United Kingdom. Radcliffe’s final comparison with food rationing tried to frame censorship as a temporary wartime necessity, designed for the benefit of the public. He must have hoped to placate his audience since he touched on a series of censorship problems, including the seemingly erratic nature of censorship due to the number of censors and newspapers, and sought to explain why certain material was problematic even though it might seem safe to civilians. Weather reports, for example, were banned because they might aid the German air raids. The broadcast was directed at listeners in the United Kingdom, where censorship was solely a wartime and a voluntary measure, and Radcliffe presented it as such. However, Radcliffe’s understanding of censorship was based on the 1938 “Regulations for Censorship” of the British Committee of Imperial Defence, which applied not only to the United Kingdom but also to the British Empire.

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In different parts of the Empire, the news coverage was not only ‘rationed’, as in the United Kingdom, but was restricted entirely. Throughout the Empire, British officials such as Herbert Phillips, Consul General in Shanghai, feared the power of a free press in the colonies, dependencies, and other spheres of British influence. As he wrote in 1938:

In principle every Anglo Saxon strongly objects ‘censorship’ as constituting an unwarrantable interference with the press but in present circs. [circumstances] insistence on entire freedom of publication at S’hai [Shanghai] is like claiming the right to walk into a magazine of explosives with a naked light in one’s hand. (Licensing of Newspapers Regulations 1938, p. 287)

For Phillips, freedom of the press was dangerous and allowing it was reckless. What did this mean for censorship in the British colonies? To date, academic research on censorship in the British Empire has focused chiefly on press censorship in British India. However, this does not adequately represent the multiple approaches to censorship in the British Empire. In British India, not only were local regulations specific to India, but it was also administered in a way that was unlike most other colonies. The India Office administered India, while the Colonial Office administered most other colonies.

 

But censorship was never a primary concern of the Colonial Office. Colonial officials in London were unaware of colonial censorship and expected that voluntary censorship, as practised in the United Kingdom, would be applied in the British Empire. The Colonial Office investigated how the colonies administered censorship only after complaints from journalists writing for empire newspapers accumulated. Interestingly, the feedback from the colonies revealed diverse approaches under the Colonial Office’s jurisdiction. Notably, the Chinese press faced mandatory pre-publication censorship, which makes in-depth research in colonies such as Hong Kong particularly interesting. The interaction between the Colonial Office and the colonial officials on the ground reveals the extent to which local governors shaped censorship in the colonies. These were localised practices that became increasingly homogenous over time in different colonies. The combination of local and imperial guidelines shaped censorship in the colonies. However, a comprehensive overview of the Empire's censorship is still lacking.

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Taking the colony of Hong Kong as an example, how did censorship there differ from censorship in the United Kingdom? Firstly, the reasons for censorship in Hong Kong greatly differed from wartime censorship in the UK. In Hong Kong, there had been visible censorship for Chinese newspapers since the 1920s, when strikes challenged British rule. The tightening of censorship was a local measure to control protests and uprisings in the colony and was not revisited after the protests had subsided. The result was a dual censorship regime, which redacted the Chinese-language press but not the English-language press. Other features also differed between the United Kingdom and the colonies. While the Regulations determined the secrecy of censorship in the United Kingdom, censorship in Hong Kong was obvious. In the colony, the local Governor placed the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs in charge of censoring the Chinese press. Its head, the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, Ronald North, regularly met with journalists to tell them what topics or words not to print. If journalists covered them anyway, the sensitive Chinese characters were replaced by symbols like “□”, “×” or “△”. In 1940, for example, the Chinese newspaper Da gong bao (大公报) published an article that consisted entirely of “□” and was utterly unintelligible. One of the attending journalists was Sa Kongliao (萨空了), a Chinese journalist who came to Hong Kong to cover the Sino-Japanese war for the paper Libao (立报).