Hong Kong press wonders who will be next to fall

When the Hong Kong National Security Police knocked on his door in the wee hours last month, journalist Ronson Chan wasn’t surprised, but he couldn’t help but shake.

The growing repression in this supposedly semi-autonomous Chinese city has silenced and imprisoned most pro-democracy activists. Now the objective begins to be the press.

Chan knew he was a target as president of the Hong Kong Journalists Association and publisher of the independent, reader-funded digital daily Stand News.

“I was mentally prepared”, he stated. But “when they showed me the search warrant, i was shaking”.

Chan used his phone to live stream his dialogue with the officers until they ordered him to stop. It was Stand News’s last exercise in journalism.

The outlet closed later that day, after authorities froze its assets under Beijing’s 2020 national security law and arrested seven employees and managers, some already retired, for posting content.sixteen”.

Two publishers were charged and remain in custody. Chan fears ending them.

“Will we be the next?”. The question flies over the newsrooms of local media, and also some international ones, in this city once considered a bastion of press freedom in the region.

“Journalists are supposed to speak truth to power”, says Lokman Tsui, former professor of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and currently in the Netherlands. “Now the truth is subversive in Hong Kong”.

Deterioration

The China continental is one of the most oppressive places in the world towards journalists. Local media are tightly controlled by the state and the movements of foreign correspondents are heavily restricted.

This was not the case in this former British colony, even after it was returned to Beijing in 1997. The local press was praised for its tenacity, controlling power in a way unimaginable in the rest of the country.

But the landscape has been deteriorating. In Reporters Without Borders’ first annual press freedom report in 2002, Hong Kong was ranked 18th. In the last year it had already dropped to 80º.

And in the last seven months this setback has become clearly palpable.

The first to fall was Apple Daily, a popular and irreverent tabloid that openly backed the 2019 pro-democracy protests and fiercely criticized Beijing.

Using the new national security law, police froze the newspaper’s assets and charged senior officials, including owner Jimmy Lay.

It was the turn of Stand News. And a week later, Citizen News, another digital outlet founded by hardened journalists, also closed, claiming that they could no longer report “without feeling afraid”.

“Press freedom has been declining for several years, but since 2020 especially it has been at full speed”, explains Yuen Chan, a veteran journalist who now teaches at the University of the City of London.

“Weather of fear”

The chief executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, constantly denies the repression against the press and assures that the authorities only apply the law.

After the closures of Stand News and Citizen News, he alleged that Western countries have national security laws “much more draconian”. But he gave no examples of those laws being used against the media.

A former editor of the independent newspaper InMedia assures that there are “an unprecedented climate of fear in the sector”. “It is difficult to assess the risk”, he said from anonymity.

For now, the national security law has not been applied in international media, but the Hong Kong government is increasingly critical of its coverage.

Many media outlets have their Asian headquarters in Hong Kong, such as AFP, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, CNN or The Economist.

Since November, authorities have published 13 letters to foreign media in English, French, Spanish or English, mostly by editorials the government did not like.

Letters to The Wall Street Journal or Britain’s The Sunday Times contained warnings of a possible violation of Hong Kong law.

In November, the city ruled out renewing the visa of an Australian correspondent for The Economist magazine, the fourth foreign journalist to have had to leave the country for visa reasons since 2018.

The editor of Stand News trusts that the international press will stay in Hong Kong and report its evolution, but advises not to underestimate its authorities.

“People used to think that Apple Daily would never close, it had a 25-year history and over a thousand employees. In spite of everything, it closed”, warns Ronson Chan.