‘I’m Afraid That I Cannot Be a Journalist Anymore’
In the summer of 2019, Ronson Chan, then an editor for the independent news outlet Stand News, took a delayed honeymoon to Germany with his wife. The timing was terrible. Prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong were at full tilt. Chan was distracted. He checked his phone at all hours, obsessively looking for updates from his colleagues. One attraction, though, was able to grab his attention: the Stasi Museum, in Berlin, which is dedicated to cataloging how East Germany’s secret police and espionage service oppressed the populace.
I met Chan for an interview at a park in Hong Kong earlier this year, and he mentioned the museum visit unprompted. Perhaps, he joked, the elderly couple exercising across from us could be agents on a mission to monitor our conversations. He wondered aloud, laughing, if microphones were hidden in the trees. Later, in a more serious tone, he told me that seeing how other people lived under state oppression was interesting and helpful. It “may be a good lesson” for those in Hong Kong, he said.
Chan is the chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the city’s largest journalism union, and has ample reason to be concerned. His bosses, the former chief editor and the acting editor of , were both arrested in late December. They were charged with sedition and denied bail. Four former members of the board were also arrested. Chan was questioned and his apartment searched theclosed. Its presence was wiped from the internet. Another of Chan’s former colleagues is on trial for violating the , imposed by Beijing in 2020, and facing a possible life sentence. Chan is occasionally followed by reporters from , who regularly attack him in their newspapers. The address of an apartment where his brother and mother live was published online. (It was falsely identified as his residence.)
