China | The state of the union

The noose around the press in Hong Kong tightens

Even advocating press freedom begins to seem a bad career move

SELINA CHENG meets local and international medias at the urgent press conference explaining how she was dismissed by Wall Street Journal
Making the newsPhotograph: REX/Shutterstock
|Hong Kong

THE FIRST press conference Selina Cheng gave as chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), a trade union, on July 17th, was her last as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Ms Cheng says that, shortly after she was appointed, her supervisors at the newspaper ordered her to withdraw, because the two roles were “incompatible” (though her beat was the car industry, not politics), and that when she declined she was fired.

Explore more

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “The state of the union”

Can she win?

From the July 27th 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

More from China

Which Olympic sports is China good at?

The country’s athletes seem to prefer competing indoors and as individuals

To revive the economy, China wants consumers to buy better stuff

It is offering them money to do so


When China hides disasters in a memory hole

A revealing attempt to forget a terrible plane crash


China is itching to mine the ocean floor

It wants to dominate critical-mineral supply chains

China unveils its new economic vision

It promises many reforms, but remains ambivalent about the role of the market

The nationalism of ideas

Xi Jinping wants Chinese systems of knowledge, free of Western values