Hong Kong’s free press has started to a disappointing start in 2022. The Cantonese Citizen News, among the last remaining important independent news outlets in Hong Kong, was the newest to close its shutters, announcing its closure on Sunday, days after the closing of Stand News.
Radio Free Asia’s Lau Siu Fung and Raymond Chung explained how Citizen News had to say goodbye to its readers over the weekend.
According to a post by Citizen News on its Facebook page, it stated that it’ll shut all its offices down from 4th January 2022 and the website will be no longer updated in the future.
“It is with great sadness that we thank all of our subscribers for their support; we will carry your deep love with us, recorded in our memories,” The award-winning organization which was crowdfunded in 2017 with over 800,000 followers informed its followers through their website.
Chris Yeung, the former president of the Hong Kong Journalists Association and the lead writer of Citizen News, informed the media “the decision to shut down was made within a very short span of time. The
trigger point is the fate of Stand News.”
Another important motive in Citizen News’ decision to shut down, was the ambiguity about whether its reporting had infringed any laws under the new Chinese national
security framework.
The move followed a police raid on Stand News last week, during which many people were arrested on sedition charges. China’s new restrictions, according to observers, have created a state of fear, suffocating
any free speech. Citizen News is among Hong Kong’s last Chinese-language pro-democracy publications.
According to Helen Davidson of the Guardian, Citizen News was unwilling to put its staff’s life at risk to accomplish its aim of fearless journalism.
Stand News and Citizen News were part of a burgeoning media ecosystem in Hong Kong that covered pro-democracy protests. They didn’t run many commercials but relied on donations. They were designed with
internet readers in mind, frequently live streaming protests for hours at a time.
Since the National Security Law went into force in July 2020, barely a few media outlets in Hong Kong have remained unaffected.
The public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) has gone from
being a watchdog to becoming a lapdog. Apple Daily had closed abruptly last June and Stand News has shut down this week with Hong Kong is now the city’s oldest autonomous Chinese-language internet outlet, with the Hong Kong Free Press serving as its English-language equivalent. InMedia, a Hong Kong-based Chinese-language news organization, had relocated earlier to Singapore in August.
Further, Hong Kong police disassembled the “Pillar of Shame memorial” to the victims of the Tiananmen Square tragedy and transported it off the University campus of Hong Kong (HKU) under high security and
barricades to prohibit media access. The sculpture has been on campus for almost two decades. Even that had to be dismantled and removed, and it was done in the middle of the night.
As the sculpture came down, nobody saw what was going on. Several saw the unannounced removal as another betrayal of the city’s essence. As officials dismantled the famed “Goddess of Democracy”
monument from the University of Hong Kong, CUHK students were seen reconstructing it using candlelight.
For decades, Hong Kong boasted of being China’s “conscience,” the only location on Chinese soil that had not forgotten the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. However, the yearly candlelight vigil commemorating
the tragic episode, which has become part of Hong Kong’s communal memory, was permitted by Beijing.
The organizer, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, was forced to disband under national security laws, and several protest organizers were imprisoned. Beijing has
made it clear that it would not allow any public displays of disobedience.
As per Nikkei Asia, two additional Hong Kong universities have followed the University of Hong Kong’s
lead in deconstructing a sculpture honouring the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in a
late-night operation.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) stated that a monument known as the Goddess of Democracy, which had been on campus since 2010, had also to be dismantled, while Lingnan University
claimed a wall sculpture commemorating the crackdown has been demolished. Chen Weiming, a Chineseborn New Zealand citizen living in the United States, created both these pieces of art.
According to Samuel Chu, the founder and president of Campaign for Hong Kong, “removing the public statues only reveals the statue-shaped hole in the hearts [and] minds of all of us.” Reflecting on “the fragility of what we and those who came before us had built,”
Woo Yat-wa a CUHK student was shocked to learn about the statue’s removal, he states, that that the government was afraid of a statue and under these uncertain times, nothing is guaranteed till the last
politically sensitive items will be removed.
In February 2021, CUHK severed relations with its student union, accusing them of “exploiting” the university for their political goal and cited possible national security legislation violations as reasons. Eight
months later, they were officially terminated. (Singapore News Network)