Citizen News

» see hkcnews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nobody raided Citizen News. That is the grave. Six days after two hundred national security officers went through the Stand News newsroom in Kwun Tong, a second Hong Kong outlet looked at what had happened and closed itself before anyone arrived.

The announcement came on Sunday 2 January 2022 and the last day was the fourth. Citizen News had been founded on New Year's Day 2017 by ten veteran journalists, so it died five years and three days old, almost exactly on its own anniversary. Around forty people were let go under Hong Kong employment law.

The statement said the outlet could no longer strive to turn its beliefs into reality without fear, given what it called the sea change in society over the previous two years. Chris Yeung, the chief writer, told reporters they could no longer work out where the legal boundaries sat, and that he could not rule out that things already published had broken the law. That second half is the part worth keeping. He was not describing a charge. He was describing not knowing whether one was coming.

I read this in English, several days late, inside the coverage of the Stand News raid. Same distance as that one and the same reason for it. What is different here is the mechanism. A self-closure leaves no charge and no court record behind it, which makes it the cheapest censorship available, because the state does not have to do anything at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who they were ~

The founders were not activists and this was not a protest publication. Ten career journalists set it up, among them Kevin Lau, a former editor in chief of Ming Pao, and Daisy Li, a former chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association who took the editor in chief job here. It ran as a non-profit on reader donations with no advertising, out of a newsroom in Cheung Sha Wan.

It was the third outlet outside the pro-Beijing camp to go inside seven months. Apple Daily had been forced shut in June 2021 after its assets were frozen, and Stand News was raided at the end of December. Citizen News did the arithmetic on both and declined to wait for its turn.

~ the year after ~

On 4 January 2023, one year to the day, the site removed everything it had ever published. The homepage was replaced with a note signed by the Citizen News team and the article links stopped resolving. The company was being wound up and the archive went with it.

Stand News deleted itself the night it died, inside eleven hours. Citizen News took twelve months and then did the same thing. Neither of them was ordered to. When the offense is publication itself, five years of published work is five years of exposure, and the only way to shrink it is to take it down yourself.

What is left sits on the Internet Archive in uploads made by people who never worked there, a capture of the outlet's Instagram and a collection of its columns. hkcnews.com is still registered and answers anyone who asks with a 403.

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