Hong Kong Cracks Down On Media

The collapse of Hong Kong's last big pro-democracy news outlet, Stand News, caps one of the world's most dramatic declines in press freedom this year, reports Bloomberg.

From he closure of Jimmy Lai's Apple Daily newspaper in July to the raid, arrests and asset seizures that precipitated Stand News's shuttering Wednesday, the global financial hub has gone from being one of Asia's most free-wheeling media markets to one of its most regulated. In addition to employing a national security law that carries sentences as long as life in prison, Hong Kong authorities have began charging journalists and internet users under a colonial-era sedition law that can jail a writer for up to two years.

While Hong Kong's crackdown is unique to events in the former British colony, where Beijing is eager to prevent a return of the mass democracy demonstrations of two years ago, similar changes were seen across the globe in 2021. Governments — threatened by pandemic-fueled economic upheaval and emboldened by former President Donald Trump's campaign against "fake news" — appear poised for more steps to silence critical coverage in the year ahead. 

In China, journalist Zhang Zhan is reportedly close to death amid a hunger strike in protest against her four-year jail sentence for reporting on Covid-19. Employees of Twitter Inc. who didn’t delete accounts criticizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government faced the threat of prosecution in India, the world’s biggest democracy. In Russia, authorities this month targeted two human-rights groups for closure, including one that tracks political prisoners. Iran, Egypt and Zimbabwe all moved to weaken journalists’ ability to report on the reality of the pandemic. 

Journalism was completely or partly blocked in almost three-quarters of the 180 countries ranked in the latest survey by non-government organization Reporters Without Borders.  The group found that 488 journalists were in jail, an all-time high since it began compiling numbers in 1995. 

"Press freedom is on the back foot,” said Keith Richburg, director of the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Center and president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong. “Trump helped create echo chambers of fake news, where anything that criticizes you is fake.”

"What's happening in Hong Kong is part of a pattern of retrenchment,” he added. “The scope of countries where the press is actually free is getting smaller and smaller. Countries play lip service to the idea of press freedom without actually practicing it."

The takedown of Stand News was more than just a blow to the local opposition. It marked the erasure of an influential organ of civic debate. The online platform founded in 2014 had in recent months investigated poor labor conditions and city officials receiving gift baskets from beleaguered property developer China Evergrande Group. The closure was the latest of several shocks since China imposed the national security law in June 2020 and began to crack down on Hong Kong civil institutions where criticism of the Communist Party once flourished. Over the past 12 months, some of the city’s largest labor unions have disbanded, international non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International have left town and a new legislature was elected under a system that vetted candidates for their loyalty to the ruling party. More than 160 people have now been arrested by the local national security department.