Where Foreign Correspondents Capitulated to Autocracy
When Allan Au didn’t post his Wordle score on Facebook one morning this month, his friends began to worry. For Au, a longtime journalist and media trainer in Hong Kong, the ritual was less about flexing his vocabulary skills than a deliberate way to indicate that he was still free. His friends, it turned out, had cause for concern: Au had been arrested on suspicion of committing sedition.
The next day, I drafted a statement about his arrest on behalf of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) press-freedom committee, of which I was a member. By then, Au had been released on bail, but members of the committee agreed in our Signal group chat that it was important to call attention to the situation. If the arrest of a journalist doesn’t merit words of concern from a press club, after all, what does? My draft detailed a few of Au’s accomplishments: He
