A Hong Kong court found two former editors of the now-defunct Stand News guilty of “sedition” on Thursday for their coverage of the pro-democracy uprising in 2019.
It was the first time journalists had been found guilty of sedition in Hong Kong since China took control of the island in 1997.
Stand News was a non-profit website founded in 2014, the year of the “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong Kong. When the much larger pro-democracy protests of 2019 broke out, the website’s popularity exploded.
At its peak in 2019, Stand News reported more than 20 million page views per month. Fresh donations poured in, and the formerly shoestring website suddenly had more than 60 employees, but, then, the Chinese communist puppet government in Hong Kong decided to crush the pro-democracy movement and shut down its media organs.
Apple Daily, the enormously popular pro-democracy paper that billionaire Jimmy Lai founded, was among the first to fall. Stand News staffers said founder and chief editor Chung Pui-kuen remained committed to delivering the news, even though he knew the communists would be coming for him next.
In late December 2021, a swarm of Hong Kong police descended upon the offices of Stand News, seizing its computers and arresting staffers. Inspired by Chung’s example, one reporter kept banging away at his final article until the police pulled his headphones off.
Within a few days, Stand News management decided to shut down the entire operation to spare its employees from further harassment and arrest. There was no saving Chung, now 54, who was found guilty of sedition on Thursday, along with his former acting editor-in-chief, Patrick Lam, 36, and Best Pencil Hong Kong, the holding company for Stand News.
Prosecutors said Chung and Lam committed seditious acts by publishing 17 stories that criticized the Chinese communist government in Beijing, its Hong Kong puppet administration, and the tyrannical “national security law” imposed in 2020 to wipe out the remains of the pro-democracy movement. The court agreed that 11 of these 17 articles were seditious.
Many of these stories were classified as “seditious” merely because Stand reporters interviewed people the communist regime had classified as “traitors.” The court was unmoved by Chung and Lam’s lawyers pointing out that Stand News also conducted interviews with supporters of the Chinese government.
The judge in the case, Kwok Wai-kin, thought it was astonishing that “many citizens opposed the Hong Kong government and central government” in 2019 and ruled as though those people had been tricked into committing “illegal” acts by the likes of Stand News.
Lam was unable to attend the hearing for health reasons, but he penned a defiant letter in defense of journalism that his lawyer read to the court.
“I believe the main reason that Stand News could survive for seven years was because readers wanted to read the news that was truly not influenced by corporations, powers, or political parties,” Lam said in his letter.
Lam said he was proud to work for a publication that would “speak up for the powerless, the marginalized, and the minority.”
“Journalists do not have to be loyal to anyone, support anyone, or be enemies of anyone — and if we really have someone to be loyal to, it will be the public and only the public because we believe in freedom of the press and freedom of speech,” he said.
Chung and Lam are scheduled to be sentenced on September 26 and will be allowed bail until then. They were tried under a more lenient colonial-era law instead of the “national security law,” so they will face up to two years in prison for sedition instead of the ten years that the new law stipulates. They were both detained for almost a year after the December 2021 police raid on Stand News.
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