The Chinese Government’s Changing Strategies for Media Capture in Hong Kong

The last speaker in this ICA 2024 conference is Francis Lee, whose focus is on the experience of media capture in Hong Kong. Typically, such media capture can involve ownership cooptation, advertising and other financial incentives, cognitive capture of journalists through constant interactions, legal measures and the criminalisation of journalistic activities, and even violence with impunity against journalists.

But not all such strategies are used in all countries where such media capture takes place, and governments may change their mix of these strategies over time. Their choice depends on local contexts (such as the exploitability of economic or legal systems for such strategies), as well as on the strength of the state’s interest in maintaining a façade of liberty and democracy. This is demonstrated by the changes experienced in Hong Kong from the early 1990s to the early 2020s.

Several strategies can be observed here: media ownership cooptation has been the first and initially preferred strategy, with Hong Kong media being taken over by Beijing-aligned proprietors, and this has led to a precipitous drop in Hong Kong’s World Press Freedom Index rating (from 18th in 2002 to 80th in the world in 2020), with journalistic self-censorship seen as particularly prominent.

Ownership cooptation also has its limitations, though: Hong Kong’s special economic status in China also depends on its free market system, and this enabled pro-democratic media owners to resist such cooptation and even led Beijing-aligned media owners to retain some degree of autonomy in their news coverage. Ownership cooptation therefore facilitated media capture only to a certain extent.

The spectacular umbrella movement protests in 2014 and anti-extradition protests in 2019, and the challenge to the pro-Beijing regime that these (and the journalists’ coverage of the protests) presented, led to a shift in state strategies, however: they emboldened emerging online media, in particular, and showed that ownership cooptation had been inadequate in supporting Beijing’s interests. With the existing equilibrium thus disrupted, the Chinese government took a more heavy-handed approach from here, moving from ownership cooptation to the weaponisation of legal systems.

This involved the 2020 National Security Law and a set of related provisions, as well as reactivating colonial-era laws on sedition and other legal tools. This undermined many critical media outlets and removed some critical topics from media coverage altogether. There is a need to pay greater attention to the dynamics inherent in state media capture over time, therefore.