It’s taken a mere 24 years for China to kill press freedom in Hong Kong

This is how press freedom in Hong Kong ends: not with a whimper but a bang.

The dramatic forced closure of the city’s leading Chinese-language newspaper, Apple Daily — 500 police flooding its newsroom, its founder in jail, seven of its writers and executives arrested — lights up the all-too-global trend of a confident authoritarianism relying on nostrums of national security to screw down an independent media.

And in Hong Kong of all places, a proud media centre with a century-long tradition of a free media, a city that’s come to stand for the enduring popularity of democracy.

It’s not just Apple Daily. Public broadcaster RTHK and major English language voice the South China Morning Post are also under pressure. Traditional public demonstrations of democratic support and solidarity, like the annual June 4 Tiananmen Square commemoration, have been banned.

Today, July 1, marks the 24th anniversary of the handover of the former British colony to China with the promise of the light-handed one-country-two-systems. Usually it’s marked with public rallies for democracy. This year, like last, it’s banned (ostensibly due to COVID-19).

Last year 370 people were arrested in the day’s protest which followed a new national security law imposed from Beijing, fracturing the territory’s autonomy.

That law made Apple Daily a rolling target of the crackdown. In August 2020 its founder Jimmy Lai, was arrested for his role in “unauthorised” demonstrations about 18 months earlier over a proposed extradition law allowing people arrested in Hong Kong to be interrogated, tried and jailed in mainland China. (A similar proposal was defeated by public protests in 2003.)

Lai, 67, was jailed in December and in May was sentenced to 14 months’ jail. He faces further charges under the national security law.

Two weeks ago, on June 17, about 500 police raided the paper’s newsroom. Its funds and other assets were frozen. Seven staff have been arrested, including just this week when 57-year-old senior journalist Fung Wai-kong was detained at the airport and charged with “conspiring to collude with foreign countries or foreign forces to endanger national security”.

Last Thursday the paper published its final edition.

The public broadcaster RTHK — its independence supposedly guaranteed by editorial charter — has seen management and editorial changes to render it more compliant with intervention in news programs and staffing. Its political satire Headliner launched in 1989, was “suspended” in June last year.

The English-language South China Morning Post has become more cautious since its co-owner, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, was mysteriously detained in China last year. Ma took over the masthead in 2015. He’s been largely hands-off, allowing the paper to grow as a respected voice for news on China.

He is reportedly now under orders from Beijing to sell, presumably to a state-owned enterprise or some more compliant billionaire.

The annual press freedom reports of the Hong Kong Journalists Association have demonstrated increased self-censorship and governmental secrecy for over a decade. Most of Hong Kong’s independent media are blocked by China’s Great Firewall and some local journalists have been denied access to the mainland. Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong (then working for Singapore’s The Strait Times), was jailed in China in 2005, released only in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics.

It’s not just the news media. In 2015 its strong book publishing tradition was chilled when five book-sellers associated with the city’s Causeway Books were detained in China, including one seized in the city. (Apple Daily was one of the few Chinese language media to consistently cover the case.)

Australia’s media connections with Hong Kong run deep — a common first (and lingering) stop for Australian journalists and many Hong Kong journalists now live in Australia.

The South China Morning Post was co-founded by Sydney-born Tse Tsan-tai in 1903; the Hong Kong Journalists Association by Jack Spackman in 1968; Richard Hughes (fictionalised both by Ian Fleming and John Le Carre) sent the Cold War-watching China from the city; the Murdochs passed through, owning, first, the South China Morning Post and then the Star Asia satellite broadcaster (where son James made his managerial chops).

Once a vibrant media city with unique character, Hong Kong now is more recognised as a model of a national security-driven authoritarianism, with Chinese characteristics.