Zooming through Hong Kong traffic on the way to school every morning, Joey Siu often found herself flipping through various newspapers.
Some were pro-democracy, others pro-government, but they were all readily available in the lobby of her apartment building and all over the city.
“That’s something that we grew up having such an abundant access to,” Siu said. “That became such an essential part of our identity.”
Now an exiled Hong Kong activist based in Washington, Siu looks back with nostalgia on that daily ritual. Much has changed since Siu’s elementary school days in Hong Kong, when she started the routine.
In hindsight, Siu says she took for granted how easy it was to find newspapers, from her building’s lobby to the aunties hawking them on Hong Kong’s busy streets.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think today, if I were still in Hong Kong, I would still be able to do that,” Siu said.
Journalists in crosshairs
That’s because the government has forced some newspapers, like Apple Daily, to close. Hong Kong authorities have also jailed journalists and activists to send the message that dissent is no longer tolerated in what was once a bastion of press freedom in Asia.
In Apple Daily’s case, the newspaper’s publisher, Jimmy Lai, has been held in solitary confinement since late 2020. The 76-year-old British national is standing trial on charges of collusion with foreign forces and sedition. The charges, which Lai rejects, are widely viewed as politically motivated.
Apple Daily’s forced closure in 2021 and Lai’s legal battle underscore the rapid downfall of press freedom and other civil liberties in Hong Kong since China’s strict national security law came into effect in 2020.
In the years since then, Hong Kongers say they have been left to grapple with stark feelings of grief and loss as they witness their home quickly transform from a place that was once imbued with freedom into something unrecognizable.
Lai is counted among more than 1,800 political prisoners in Hong Kong, according to the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council. The publisher is one of many, but his case is arguably the most prominent, multiple activists said.
Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1947, Lai fled to Hong Kong as a stowaway on a boat when he was 12. He worked in a garment sweatshop before eventually founding the successful clothing brand Giordano.
A onetime billionaire, Lai founded the Apple Daily newspaper in 1995. The newspaper made a name for itself through its critical coverage of Hong Kong and China. But the outspoken nature of Apple Daily led to authorities arresting Lai and other top editors, freezing millions of the newspaper’s assets and forcing it to shutter.
Lai’s trial began in late 2023 and was supposed to last around 80 days. It is now set to resume on November 20, when Lai is expected to take the stand. Lai’s international legal team continues to call for his release.
“I think the Hong Kong authorities were frightened of the world seeing Jimmy Lai’s courage,” Caoilfhionn Gallagher, the head of Lai’s international legal team, told VOA about the delay.
Lai knew that he would eventually be arrested, and he had the means to flee Hong Kong. The fact that he chose to stay and stand up for press freedom is why his case resonates with so many people, multiple analysts told VOA.
“That’s the spirit that everyone respects,” said Frances Hui, a Washington-based policy coordinator at the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. “He has the courage that a lot of us don’t, and that’s very inspiring.”
Rise and fall
The story of Lai also reflects the story of Hong Kong itself. Established as a British colony and trading outpost in the 1840s, the territory was at the center of a period of great economic development when Lai arrived as a child.
Lai’s business success grew as Hong Kong developed into a global financial hub. In turn, Apple Daily’s closure and Lai’s arrest came amid the broader deterioration of civil liberties in Hong Kong. That’s another reason Lai’s case resonates with so many people, according to his son.
“His story mirrors Hong Kong’s rise and fall,” Jimmy Lai’s son, Sebastien, told VOA during a recent advocacy trip in Washington.
Assaults on press freedom haven’t stopped. In September, two journalists from Hong Kong’s now-shuttered Stand News were sentenced to jail for sedition. Also in September, the Hong Kong Journalists Association reported that dozens of Hong Kong journalists and their families had faced harassment since June.
“There’s still these underlying anxieties in the media industry. People are still on edge,” the association’s chairperson, Selina Cheng, said.
In an email to VOA, a Hong Kong government spokesperson denied that civil liberties and the rule of law have declined there. The spokesperson added that “rights and freedoms are not absolute” anywhere in the world.
“In particular, journalists, like everyone else, have an obligation to abide by all the laws. Their freedom of commenting on and criticizing government policies remains uninhibited as long as they do not violate the law,” the spokesperson said.
China’s foreign ministry did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.
A couple of years ago, the average Hong Konger probably still kept a close watch on Lai’s case, according to Anna Kwok, executive director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council.
“But in 2024, we have seen a new phenomenon that a lot of Hong Kongers become numb to the political news,” she said.
Treasure swallowed up
For many years, Hong Kong’s identity was based on the freedoms its population had long enjoyed, according to fellow activist Sunny Cheung.
“Hong Kong was like a treasure,” said Cheung, who now works at the Jamestown Foundation, a research group in Washington. But things have changed. “Hong Kong is no longer Hong Kong,” Cheung added.
Hong Kongers built the city into something special, according to Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. “And now that city was essentially taken away from them by the Chinese government, swallowed up, and now what is being spat out is completely unrecognizable,” she said.
The jarringly rapid degradation of the city’s freedoms has led to collective grief among Hong Kongers, multiple analysts said.
Their home still exists, but their home is not exactly their home anymore because the things that made it special and beloved — the vibrant media landscape, the freedoms, the distinction from China — are no more. Hong Kongers are mourning Hong Kong.
“It is heartbreaking that they managed to snuff out what made the place great,” Sebastien Lai said.
The consequences are severe. Unrest and change in Hong Kong appear to have had a harmful effect on people's mental well-being, with multiple studies showing increased rates of depression and suicide, especially among young people.
City’s soul
Cities are more than just the buildings that comprise them, according to Jeffrey Alexander, professor emeritus of sociology at Yale University. “It’s like a living entity that has a soul. It has a consciousness. It has a sense of a collective identity,” Alexander told VOA from Connecticut.
As a result, like grieving the death of a person, some Hong Kongers find themselves grieving the death of their home. The city’s famed skyline hasn’t changed, but the core of its identity has.
“The sense of loss in Hong Kong is that you saw something that by every means possible you didn’t think could fall apart, and then you saw it fall apart,” said Mark Simon, who worked with Jimmy Lai for decades in Hong Kong.
There’s a conflict and a connection between an individual Hong Konger’s identity and the collective identity of the city’s population, according to Alexander. On one hand, people in Hong Kong can still carry out their lives as long as they aren’t jailed. But at the same time, "you don’t live only as an individual,” he said. “You live as part of something larger than yourself.”
Alexander agreed that grief over what has happened to Hong Kong resembles grief over the death of a loved one. But he also proposed an alternative: “Is it like a close friend dying, or your father dying or your wife dying, or is it as if they were murdered?”
In many ways, Lai’s plight embodies that collective grief.
“He’s going to become a martyr,” Alexander said.
What makes matters even more difficult is that public expressions of this grief are tightly controlled in Hong Kong, according to Kwok. “People’s rights to feel and experience their own emotions, to express their feelings, are essentially taken away,” she said.
Still, others, like Shirley Leung, who worked as a reporter at Apple Daily from 2018 until its closure in 2021, maintain that Hong Kong hasn’t died yet. Leung left Hong Kong in 2022 and is now the editor-in-chief of the exiled Hong Kong news outlet Photon Media in Taiwan.
Rather than thinking of Hong Kong as dead, Leung says she prefers to think of it as in a hospital’s intensive care unit.
"It is still too early to say it’s dead,” Leung said. “Because if it’s dead, then what’s the point of working so hard outside Hong Kong?”
