Will Hong Kong’s Free Press Survive?
In the summer of 2019, Nabela Qoser, a broadcast reporter, became the face of Hong Kong’s adversarial press. The city was in deep political crisis. Anti-Beijing protests numbering in the hundreds of thousands of people had erupted over a government push to allow the extradition of suspected criminals to mainland China. Then, one evening during an unusually hot July, a mob of men dressed in white, bearing metal rods and bamboo poles, attacked a crowd in a train station that included people returning home from the protests. The police, claiming to be busy elsewhere, did not immediately arrest the assailants. At a news conference the next morning, the city watched as Qoser fired rapid questions at Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leader.