Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/extended-interview-magazine-editor-hung-huang Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript While reporting in China in May, Margaret Warner spoke to Hung Huang, CEO of China Interactive Media Group and editor of the lifestyle magazine iLook, about the state of media freedom in China today. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. MARGARET WARNER: What are the red lines when writing about politics? Help a Westerner understand… HUNG HUANG: What are the sensitive spots? Okay, well first of all, Tibet is a sensitive (issue), and in particular Tibet independence. I think there are lots of internal debates about Tibet in China as well, but I think Tibetan independence is off-limits. You can, Chinese just feel Tibet is part of China and it's just an overwhelming national feeling that Tibet is part of China and Taiwan is part of China. MARGARET WARNER: Things about Tiananmen Square are blocked. HUNG HUANG: Tiananmen is a bit blocked. Everybody has their own opinion about it all. There are those who are pro and there are those who are con, but I think it is sort of a tacit understanding that it's just a taboo subject. Even though, I think, probably debate goes on, not only from grassroots, all the way to the top echelon of Chinese government about how to sort of evaluate what happened in June 1989. I think this will eventually become something that Chinese will have to talk about. But not now. It's just something that is too sensitive. And the fact that it's a subject we don't talk about — quite different from Tibet and Taiwan — is because there is no consensus. There is a debate, but there's no verdict and that debate is going to happen within the Chinese government before the public can debate about it. MARGARET WARNER: How do you as a media CEO and a writer yourself, I mean how restrictive is it for you? HUNG HUANG: As a writer who writes satire, I feel, you know, I would love to be like Jon Stewart on the Daily Show and be able to poke fun at everything, but that's not something you can do. As a satire writer, what you have to do is pick material that is so widely known and twist it and make it fun, right? But, you know, what is so widely known are always politics and economics. So that's why satirists need that feed almost, it's like a food for people, unless we can, but we are like, we have the food, we just can't eat it.As the government looks at these things, is that, you know, you have to go back to ancient China whereby if you want to know who's a good guy, who's a bad guy, the emperor's way of passing on the message is sort of the emperor's wall poster, which is kind of like a newspaper — in ancient Chinese times — it's the government and the emperor's edict, which says, you know, the emperor has decreed today blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a messenger from province to province who writes it up in beautiful calligraphy, chops it and goes to the village and puts it on the wall and all the people come and read it. And whatever it says, the people have a habit of taking it as the truth. Nobody ever questions what the emperor said.So given that as a tradition, the state media apparatus has a great responsibility in what they say. Because it is so easy for them to hype up something and that's why the gag┬árule is because, you know, they're kept on such a short leash because people actually — unlike in the United States — believe what they read in newspapers in China. And that's frightening.