Hong Kong pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily on Wednesday announced that it was shutting down, saying the decision was made “in view of staff members’ safety” after a raid by police last week.
The development is the latest in a series of crackdowns by Beijing on freedom of speech in Hong Kong.
Police on June 4 cordoned off a park normally used for commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and arrested the organizer of an annual vigil for Chinese students killed on that day.
Reuters reported that vigils went ahead across the territory in churches and at private residences. People in the US consulate and EU offices could be seen lighting candles in front of their windows, and jailed democracy advocate Jimmy Sham (岑子傑) wrote on Facebook that he planned to “light a cigarette at 8pm.”
The show of defiance was proof that Beijing had not accomplished its goal of scaring Hong Kongers into compliance, and neither has it accomplished its aim of erasing Hong Kongers’ memories of certain events or their access to the facts surrounding them — an aim that was evident in the use of Internet censorship following protests last year.
China’s efforts to achieve that aim are only serving to alienate Hong Kongers, as well as Taiwanese.
Reuters on Jan. 15 reported that Internet service provider Hong Kong Broadband Network said that it would block any content that it deemed to be inciting acts that contravene the National Security Law. One of the sites reportedly blocked by the company was HKChronicles, which provides information about protests in the territory.
The Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing was banned in China in April last year after Hong Kong democracy advocates staged virtual protests in the game. It is likely that the game — and possibly Nintendo’s online service — will also be banned in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong politician and data specialist Wong Ho-wa (黃浩華) told Reuters that he was “deeply worried that Hong Kongers’ freedom to access information on the Internet was starting to be affected.”
The open government data community g0vhk, founded by Wong, has also been taken offline.
Meanwhile, the closure of the Hong Kong and Macau representative offices in Taipei, as well as the refusal by the Hong Kong government to renew Taiwanese officials’ visas, has exacerbated the alienation Taiwanese have felt about the crackdown in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong previously served as a bridge between Taiwan and China, and Beijing’s decision to destroy that bridge by suppressing Hong Kongers’ rights and cutting off official ties will ultimately only hurt China.
A lack of access to information in China means that Chinese often have a different understanding or lack of knowledge of certain issues, which affects communications with the international community.
Hong Kongers and Taiwanese have long enjoyed a favorable relationship purely because free access to information in Hong Kong had allowed people there to understand Taiwan’s precarious situation and formulate their own opinion on the issue of its sovereignty. If that information is taken away, Hong Kongers in a generation or two would not understand Taiwan’s situation, meaning that nobody in China would be capable of speaking with Taiwanese on equal terms.
It is unlikely that China will pay any heed to calls from Taipei to protect Hong Kong’s freedoms, but the government should at least try to convey to Beijing that by limiting Hong Kongers’ access to information, it is burning a bridge to Taiwan and the rest of the world.
If Beijing were smart, it would allow Hong Kong to become a model for reform in China, rather than force its restrictions on the territory.
On Sept. 3 in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rolled out a parade of new weapons in PLA service that threaten Taiwan — some of that Taiwan is addressing with added and new military investments and some of which it cannot, having to rely on the initiative of allies like the United States. The CCP’s goal of replacing US leadership on the global stage was advanced by the military parade, but also by China hosting in Tianjin an August 31-Sept. 1 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which since 2001 has specialized
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
A report by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on Tuesday last week warned that China is operating illegal oil drilling inside Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island (Dongsha, 東沙群島), marking a sharp escalation in Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. The report said that, starting in July, state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp installed 12 permanent or semi-permanent oil rig structures and dozens of associated ships deep inside Taiwan’s EEZ about 48km from the restricted waters of Pratas Island in the northeast of the South China Sea, islands that are home to a Taiwanese garrison. The rigs not only typify
RSS