Last vestiges of free speech shut

The closure of Hong Kong’s last two dissident media voices affirms the importance of the decision by major democracies, including Australia, to observe a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing next month. The Chinese Communist Party’s unrelenting assault on press freedom and free thought was clear in last week’s snuffing out of the Stand News website and Sunday’s closure of Citizen News. Stand News was Hong Kong’s most influential pro-democracy news site following the closure of Jimmy Lai’s Apple Daily last June.

In September last year, prominent pro-Beijing Hong Kong politician Regina Ip trumpeted the continued existence of Stand News as showing “freedom of expression is still alive and well” in the territory. She little understood the malice of the regime; 200 armed police stormed Stand News’s offices last week, arresting seven staff. The site was charged with sedition and “inciting hatred against the Hong Kong government”.

The raid also sounded the death knell for Citizen News which, in a Facebook post on Sunday, announced it was shutting down. “We have always loved this land, but at present we are helpless as we are not only facing wind and rain but tornadoes and huge waves,” it told readers. In a final jab at Beijing, Stand News published a list of 50 independent media organisations that had been forced to shut in Hong Kong in the past year. Nothing better sums up the communist assault on the institutions that made Hong Kong Asia’s globally admired media hub.

While the plight of China’s Uighurs was the initial motivator for the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics, outrages committed in Hong Kong also should be a factor. Watching the Games without taking a stand over Beijing’s destruction of basic freedoms would have been unconscionable. More countries should join the boycott.