The Overseas Press Club of America (OPC) has released a statement saying that the Chinese pressure on both international and Chinese media—“threats, intimidation, censorship, and denial of work visas”—is as its worst since 1989, the year of the Tiananmen protests, posing a threat to press freedom in both China and Hong Kong.
The organisation, an international association of journalists founded in 1939 in New York by a group of foreign correspondents, said that Hong Kong’s decades-old status as “an oasis of free speech and a robust media” is now “at risk”, citing violent attacks on journalists and, supposedly, demands from the Central Liaison Office for censorship and advertising boycotts of independent media.
The statement is assumedly referring to the brutal attack on former Ming Pao editor Kevin Lau in February and the beating of two senior executives of new media company Hong Kong Morning News, as well as the alleged advertising boycotts of Next Media (the owner of Apple Daily) by HSBC and Standard Chartered.
The OPC concludes that Hong Kong would rapidly lose its status as a global financial hub if it were to lose the freedom of its press, and that China is more likely to eventually develop its own media freedom if Hong Kong’s freedoms remain.
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