Stand News

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

~ the obit ~

the closure notice was two lines long and went up at four in the afternoon. by eleven that night the website and every social account had been emptied out, which is why there is nothing left to link to. the deletion was part of the same day's work as the death.

the outlet opened on 30 december 2014, six months after tony tsoi closed house news, his previous hong kong site, saying he was afraid. stand news was set up as a non-profit running on reader donations. surveys by the chinese university of hong kong rated it the most credible online news source in the city, first in 2016 and again in 2019. it covered the 2019 protests closely and was one of the last outlets in the territory still doing that after apple daily was forced shut in june 2021.

i read about this the way most people outside hong kong did, in english, afterward. stand news published in chinese for a city of seven million readers and was never going to turn up in my browsing. the reason it belongs here is that almost every grave on this site died of neglect or of money, and this one died of two hundred police officers arriving before dawn.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ where it came from ~

house news launched in 2012 and closed in july 2014, weeks before the umbrella movement began. tsoi's stated reason at the time was fear for his safety, which reads differently now than it did then. stand news was the replacement, built by the same people, with chung pui-kuen as editor in chief and yu ka-fai alongside him.

the structure mattered later. because it was a non-profit with a board rather than a proprietor with a payroll, the arrests in 2021 reached people whose connection to the journalism was governance. margaret ng, a barrister and former legislator, had served on that board. so had denise ho, a cantopop singer. neither of them had ever assigned a story.

~ the morning of the raid ~

more than two hundred national security officers went into the kwun tong office in the early hours of 29 december 2021. seven people connected to the outlet were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to publish seditious material. police carried computers and phones out of the building along with hk$500,000 in cash, and froze hk$61 million in company assets. the freeze is what actually ended it, because an outlet living on donations cannot pay anybody with its accounts locked.

senior superintendent steve li said the people arrested held important roles in the company's editorial direction and strategy. the chief secretary, john lee, called them evil elements. the notice on the site said operations were halting immediately and that updates to the website and all social platforms had stopped. the staff were dismissed the same day.

~ what sedition meant ~

the charge was not brought under the national security law of 2020. it came out of the crimes ordinance, a colonial-era statute that had sat unused for decades before being revived, and it criminalizes publishing material with seditious intention rather than any specific act. that distinction is the part worth keeping. the law used to close hong kong's most trusted online newsroom was written by the british.

chung pui-kuen and patrick lam were convicted on 29 august 2024, after a judge examined seventeen articles and found eleven of them seditious. on 26 september chung was sentenced to twenty one months and lam to eleven. lam walked out of the hearing, having already served ten months and nine days on remand, with a further three weeks taken off for his health. they were the first journalists convicted of sedition in hong kong since the handover in 1997.

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