What Happens When Your Neighbour Gets Arrested for Running a Newspaper and You Start Counting Your Own Locks

Taiwan is, geographically and politically, the place you end up when you have fled Hong Kong's media crackdown and need somewhere to continue working. It is also the place that watches the Hong Kong situation with the specific attention of someone observing what their own future might look like if certain political arrangements change in certain ways. Taiwanese journalists covering Hong Kong are not covering an abstract foreign affairs story. They are covering a preview.

The Apple Daily Taiwan edition was a separate publication from its Hong Kong counterpart — different editorial team, different legal context, different relationship with its government — and its closure in 2021 was driven by financial pressures rather than the direct political intervention that ended the Hong Kong paper. The closure was still significant: it removed a major voice from Taiwan's media landscape at a moment when that landscape was under its own pressures and the example of what had happened in Hong Kong was fresh and immediate.

Diaspora journalists from Hong Kong who relocated to Taiwan found a media environment that was, in meaningful ways, genuinely free — contested, politically divided, occasionally chaotic, but free in the sense that reporters could cover government without becoming targets of the government's legal machinery. This was experienced as remarkable by people who had worked in an environment where that assumption had been removed. The absence of something is noticed most clearly by those who have experienced its presence and its loss.

Taiwan's press freedom rankings — consistently among the highest in Asia — reflect a media environment that developed in specific historical circumstances: a transition from authoritarian rule to democracy that included, as a central element, the development of a genuinely independent press. Taiwanese journalists who lived through that transition understand press freedom as something that was fought for and can be lost, rather than as a natural feature of the landscape. Political reform debates in Taiwan are reported by journalists who are aware of what political reform looks like when it goes in the wrong direction, because they can see it from their windows.

The comparison between Taiwan and Hong Kong is, in Taiwanese media discourse, both constant and charged. Constant because the geographic and demographic proximity makes it inevitable. Charged because the comparison implies a future scenario that Taiwanese officials prefer to discuss in abstract terms and that Taiwanese citizens are considerably more concrete about in private conversation. Hong Kong election coverage is read in Taiwan as political science rather than foreign news — it documents what democratic processes look like when they are redesigned by a government that finds them inconvenient.

The Hong Kong journalists who relocated to Taiwan brought skills that are valued in Taiwanese newsrooms: Cantonese language capability for covering mainland Chinese sources, direct experience of the political environment they are now covering from outside, and the specific credibility of people who had their previous newsroom raided and kept working anyway. Reporter profiles from this period document the professional biographies of journalists whose careers were shaped by the Apple Daily experience and who brought that experience to new contexts.

The Taiwanese government has, intermittently, expressed support for Hong Kong press freedom in terms that are diplomatically calibrated to avoid provoking Beijing while still communicating solidarity with affected journalists. This calibration is itself a form of press freedom commentary — the fact that a democratic government must choose its words carefully when expressing support for journalists in a neighboring jurisdiction tells you something about the pressure environment in which these discussions occur.

NSL coverage in Taiwanese media is thorough and politically engaged in ways that distinguish it from coverage in most Western countries, where Hong Kong is foreign news. In Taiwan, it is neighbor news. The difference in urgency is palpable. For cross-strait press freedom commentary with British dry wit, Prat UK provides an outside perspective on an inside story.

SOURCE: Hong Kong Diaspora Journalism in Taiwan
SOURCE: https://appledaily.uk/hong-kong-diaspora-journalism/