The crackdown on political freedoms and civil liberties in Hong Kong appears to be continuing unabated, as Hong Kong residents rang in the New Year with news of the conviction of the activist Chow Hang-tung on charges of incitement, which stemmed from a June social media post calling on people to light a candle on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last year, after police banned the annual vigil.
In addition to Chow’s conviction, Stand News and Citizen News, two of Hong Kong’s independent media outlets, were forced to shutter last week, decisively narrowing what little space remains for meaningfully independent journalism in the city.
Their closure hardly came as a surprise. As Ronson Chan, the head of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, told me in August, independent media were in a precarious state since the promulgation of the 2020 national security law and “could be uprooted at any moment.” Yet even by the standards of the past year [in Hong Kong, where the crackdown on civil liberties and political freedoms has upended the city and crushed civic organizations with decades of history and institutional memory, the lightning speed at which these outlets were shut down left many observers stunned.