by Paul Harrington

HONG KONG, Jan 27 (AFP) - Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten warned the local media Monday against practising self-censorship and urged China not to clampdown on the territory's press freedom.

A threat to media freedom "is a less blatant attack on journalists than locking them up," but no less real, Patten said at a meeting here of the Commonwealth Journalists Association.

"I think that the ways in which journalists are encouraged to write what is politically correct are rather more sinuous and subtle," he added.

"Self-censorship or censorship at the news editor's desk is, I think, probably more of a realistic threat in tomorrow's world I don't say necessarily in Hong Kong than handcuffs and barred-windows."

He said China should learn about Hong Kong people's high regard for freedom from the release of Xi Yang, a reporter for the local Ming Pao daily, who was sentenced in 1994 to 12 years imprisonment in China for stealing state secrets.

Xi, 40, was released on parole Saturday after three years in jail.

"We have our own system and journalists in our own system are not put in prison for embarrassing the Government by revealing things the Government might not wish to have revealed," Patten said.

Members of the Commonwealth Journalists Association, beginning a two-day conference here, voiced their own fears for Hong Kong's media after China takes control here in July.

Chairperson of the Hong Kong affiliate, Mak Yin-ting, said that while her group welcomed Xi's release "there is nothing to be grateful to China for. He should not have been imprisoned in the first place, and the case will not help people's confidence here".

Founding President of the association, Derek Ingram, said that everybody was nervous about what was going to happen to Hong Kong.

He said his association would wait and see what happened here, but admitted there was little it could do if conditions got worse for local journalists.

Hong Kong will no longer be part of the Commonwealth after the handover of sovereignty.

Many local journalists privately complain there is already a growing climate of self-censorship in the run-up to Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty on July 1.

Articles on mainland political dissidents or Tibet, which in previous years were traditionally given large front-page prominence, are now run as smaller items on the inside pages, they say.

Hard-hitting "political" editorials are frequently substituted by non-controversial ones on such items as education or crime, they say.

"Patriotic" items, such as China's dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu-Senkaku islands, are routinely splashed.

Patten, in his speech to the journalists' conference, also urged China to learn to have faith in the people of Hong Kong.

"The best advice to Chinese officials is to be relaxed about Hong Kong, to trust Hong Kong and not to interfere in Hong Kong," he said.

The governor, who has irked China with his democratic reforms in Hong Kong ahead of the handover, said press freedom "ought to survive" because the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration stipulated that freedom of the press would continue.

"It ought to survive because it is vital to the success of this city, economically and socially," said Patten, "It is crucial for Hong Kong's continuing economic success."

Whether or not China allows Hong Kong its freedoms "will determine the way China is regarded by the world, and by Hong Kong, and it will determine how far the hopes and possibilities that Hong Kong has created are given reality in the next decade," he said.

"It is a story that matters to many, many people in this community, that matters to many people in China, and if I may say so, in the Commonwealth too, even after 1997," he said.