For 26 years, Ryan Law Wai-Kwong ran one of Hong Kong’s largest and most successful news publications, Apple Daily. Then, in 2021, 500 police officers raided the newspaper, according to media reports, and arrested Law, who was 46 at the time, and four others, including its renowned founder Jimmy Lai, on charges of collaborating with foreign groups, according to the press advocacy organization the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Overnight, Law became a symbol of the dramatic transformation of Hong Kong from a dynamic center of capitalism and media freedom to a government-controlled nation with little room for independent journalists.
“Hong Kong used to be a thriving place,” said Stephen Young, U.S. Consul General of Hong Kong from 2010 to 2013. “Hong Kong is being recast as part of the [People’s Republic of China] with all the restrictions there. I know a lot of people are still trying to make money, but anybody who gets out of line gets arrested and in prison.”
Once a former British Colony, in 1997 England turned Hong Kong over to Beijing, which allowed the city of 7.5 million people to continue as a liberal democracy with a vibrant capitalist economy.
By 2020, however, China had forced the Hong Kong legislature to pass the National Security Law, which changed everything. Where before the 100 independent publications were free from government control and censorship, now 900 previously-employed journalists are without jobs, according to Reporters Without Borders, an international non-profit organization.
In the past four years, authorities have prosecuted 28 journalists, ten of whom are still in jail, according to Hong Kong Watch, a United Kingdom non-profit organization.
“Hong Kong used to be one of the most open and easy places to report. Now in Asia, it is one of the worst for press freedom,” former president of Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club and long-time Washington Post journalist Keith Richburg said. “Without critical reporting and investigative reporting, along with a pliant rubber-stamp legislature and the decimation of independent trade unions and NGOs, no one is left to hold this Beijing-appointed government to account.”
It has become nearly impossible to report unbiased news as a journalist without risk of government punishment, said Richburg, who was also the Director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong from 2016 to 2023.
“The law was written in such a sweeping way, and with no clarification on what is and isn’t allowed, that we all knew it would become a catchall for the government and police to silence all forms of dissent,” Richburg said. “Our fears were proven later with the closure of Apple Daily and Stand News.”
The Chinese Embassy did not respond to interview requests.
Apple Daily’s Demise
Apple Daily, where Law worked as editor-in-chief, was considered a “pro-democracy” newspaper which often challenged the government’s official position
On June 16, 2021Authorities arrested a group of media executives, including Law, citing over 30 reports calling for international sanctions against China, according to the South China Morning Post.
The editorials called on organizations outside China to protect the freedom of the press and speak out against Chinese censorship in Hong Kong by writing opinion pieces, according to the CPJ.
On November 22, 2022, a Hong Kong court charged Law with “conspiracy to commit collusion with a foreign country.”
In exchange for the guilty plea, the prosecutor dropped a sedition charge, according to CPJ. His sentencing is set for February 24.
Growing Legal Consequences
This fall, a Hong Kong court for the first time convicted a journalist on charges of sedition, a charge that has been used often against people accused of making national security threats.
The former editor-in-chief of Stand News, Chung Pui Kuen, published 10 articles questioning Hong Kong’s widespread arrests on pro-democracy protesters in 2019. He was charged with conspiring to produce materials considered seditious, according to the International Federation of Journalists, an international union for journalists. In September, he was sentenced to a year and nine months.
In March, the Hong Kong Legislative Council expanded the National Security Law when it passed the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, according to Hong Kong Watch. The law allows the prosecution of any individual who speaks against the pro-Beijing government, an action described as having the “intent of hatred against the government,” according to Hong Kong Watch.
The vagueness of the new law worries pro-democracy journalists like Shirley Leung, a former Apple Daily reporter who founded Photon Media, an online news site based in Taiwan.
“The law is a bit vague, in fact, so we [Hong Kong journalists] don’t really know…what kind of words or what kind of perspectives or angles of reporting would violate [the new] law,” she said.
In the last several years, at least ten other media outlets have been founded by Hong Kong journalists in exile.
“I wish to continue reporting on Hong Kong news,” said Leung. “There are some news or some perspectives that cannot be reported inside Hong Kong now.”
But Leung said sources are increasingly afraid to help out.
“It’s very difficult to get people inside Hong Kong to talk or be interviewed with us or express their opinions,” she said. “There are some people still willing to talk, maybe anonymously.”
Such fears came swiftly.
Hong Kong Diplomats “remember the city the way it was in terms of openness, freedom, swirls of information, opportunities for people who had any variety of political views,” said Richard Boucher, a long-time State Department spokesman who was US Consul General to Hong Kong from 1996 to 1999.“It’s just a real shame to see it become more and more like just another Chinese city.”