Press freedom in Hong Kong

When I started as AFP’s bureau chief in Hong Kong in 2014, huge pro-democracy rallies known as the Umbrella Movement were erupting onto the streets, earning their name from the rag-tag assortment of umbrellas used by protesters to protect against police tear gas and pepper spray. Although there were flare-ups of violence, the protests were largely peaceful and the city was filled with hope for change. This brave optimism, which pitted the economically powerful but small former British colony against the might of mainland China, won Hong Kong’s people worldwide admiration. For many like me, an outsider living here, it deepened my affection for the semi-autonomous territory where I had already

There will be no poking fun at Xi Jinping, the Communist Party or Google. A solo exhibition of Chinese-Australian cartoonist Badiucao, originally scheduled to open over the weekend, has been called off after Beijing made unspecified threats against the artist, according to the organizers. The exhibition was titled “Gongle” – merging the Chinese name of the Communist Party and Google, which is currently developing a censored search engine for the Chinese market. It was part of the Free Expression Week co-hosted by Hong Kong Free Press, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, a series of events focused on free expression in Hong Kong after the Occupy Central pro-democracy movement

Some future historian writing a thesis on “The Death of Hong Kong” may stumble across the old 1995 Fortune Magazine cover of the same name. It may seem prescient, but premature. Instead, the late summer and early fall of 2018 will likely be deemed the turning point, when the demise of a once-great open and liberal city really began. That turning point started in July, when local police served notice on the Hong Kong National Party that it was considering a ban, accusing the obscure group of sedition — the first proposed banning of a political party since the territory’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It ended in October, when the Hong Kong government for the first time in memory eff

Hong Kong has refused to renew a work visa for a veteran Financial Times journalist, less than two months after he hosted a talk by a pro-independence political party at the city’s press club. Victor Mallet, Asia news editor at the Financial Times, is the first vice-president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong. This is currently his second stint working in the city. He returned to Hong Kong in 2016, after first working in the city from 2003 to 2008.  “This is the first time we have encountered this situation in Hong Kong, and we have not been given a reason for the rejection,” a spokeswoman for the London-based newspaper said on Friday. It is unclear why his visa renewal was d

A request by a Chinese government official asking Washington to support press freedom was met with a collective eye-roll by current and former China-based foreign correspondents. The comments from Geng Shuang, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, were made in response to reports that the US had ordered China’s leading state media outlets, Xinhua and CGTN, to register as “foreign agents.” “We hope relevant sides will facilitate and create enabling conditions for normal work of media rather than obstructing them,” he said. “China has been supporting and facilitating foreign media’s normal reporting in China.” China ranked near the bottom (176 out of 180) in this year’s World Press Freedom In

A 136-year-old play about one man’s fight against the establishment has been canceled in China, news reports say, after an interactive scene had audience members expressing criticism of the Chinese government.    Berlin-based theater company Schaubühne’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “An Enemy of the People” was in the first of a three-night run at Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts last Thursday. German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that a scene in which the audience was encouraged to shout out why they sympathized with the play’s protagonist, who was being silenced by the authorities for insisting on the truth about poisoned water, led to the audience yelling st