Jia Jia, October 15, 2025
One of the interrogators asked me:
Why do you write for Apple Daily?
… Are you only doing it for money?
I replied: Yes, for money.
Suddenly, he was enraged,
interrupted me, and sternly said:
“No! You’re writing for your ideals!”
I was stunned, and could not think of a response.
Continued from Part One, and Part Two
3. Hong Kong, the Fragrant Harbor
In the spring of 2009, weary from working on current events and having become increasingly jaded about journalistic “ideals,” I left the news magazine and joined GQ magazine’s Chinese edition as an editor. This was a new field. At that time, the government censors were generally strict on news but more lenient when it came to topics like entertainment, fashion, and sports. Hence, magazines like Vogue, GQ, Sports Illustrated, Figaro, and Marie Claire all had Chinese-language editions. Of course, this was also seen as a reflection of China’s “openness.”
I left the news business with a sense of hopelessness, but this was just me. At the time, many of my colleagues remained convinced that China’s mediascape had its best days ahead of it, especially considering the rise of online media outlets which had wider reach and seemed to have more leeway too than traditional media organizations, and were often offering salaries three to five times higher in their recruitment efforts.
On March 30, 2010, due to the Sanlu melamine-tainted milk scandal, Zhao Lianhai, the father of one of the many affected babies, was sentenced to two years in prison in Beijing for leading the effort to get the government to redress the health issues of these babies. I posted comments about this on Sina Weibo, and my account was immediately banned, permanently. Sina Weibo had just been launched around that time. After that, I rarely felt any inclination to post commentary about current affairs in China.
On October 8, 2010, Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and many pro-democracy citizens celebrated. The authorities attempted to suppress all information related to the news, yet eventually, unable to conceal it any longer, the Communist Party’s nationalist tabloid Global Times issued a commentary suggesting that it was all a Western conspiracy. Regardless, for the time being, the political reform efforts made by intellectuals from the Tiananmen Square protest generation had ground to a halt.
It was this sense of loss that led me to find work at a news magazine in Hong Kong in the spring of 2011. There, I attempted to write articles free of censorship. Being able to write freely was truly a rare and precious opportunity for me. I used to say, in mainland China, all writers self-censored, having the Central Propaganda Department living in their minds.
Before long, however, I was approached right in Hong Kong by authorities from Guangzhou. We sat in a Victorian-style café in North Point, as they questioned me about why I had reported on news related to Chen Guangcheng (陈光诚) and Ai Weiwei (艾未未), and why I didn’t love the country. Although I had experienced such conversations in Beijing, their unabashed approach in Hong Kong came as a shock.
At that time, Hong Kong was on the eve of tremendous change. Beijing repeatedly vetoed electoral reform proposals in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and promoted “national education” in secondary school textbooks. The young people of Hong Kong were keenly worried about the future: that through gradual erosion, Hong Kong would lose its liberties one after another. This concern became a reality in 2019, seven years later. But that’s a story for another time.
Going from working in Beijing to working in Hong Kong further confirmed my vague impressions from before. The gap between Hong Kong and the mainland was widening and mainland youth were largely unaware of what was happening in Hong Kong. Some local media outlets in Hong Kong labeled mainlanders as “locusts,” while Kong Qingdong (孔庆东), a prominent leftist professor at Peking University who had a sizeable online presence, publicly called Hongkongers dogs.
Subsequently, the views and aspirations of Hong Kong’s youth gained more traction. Discussions about the future of Hong Kong stirred uneasy undercurrents in the city. The differences in the political systems over Hong Kong and the mainland were precisely why Hong Kong became a world city in Asia. What forces turned this tiny island hardly visible on the map into the freest and most enchanting city in the East? It was precisely Hong Kong’s global and open nature that motivated the Beijing regime to clamp down on it.
In February 2014, the then-editor-in-chief of Ming Pao, Kevin Lau Chun-to (刘进图), was attacked in the street by unknown assailants, sustaining six stab wounds that put him in critical condition and once again triggered concerns among Hongkongers about freedom of the press in their city. In February 2015, editor-in-chief Cheung Kim-hung (钟天祥) took out a Ming Pao front-page headline on classified Canadian documents concerning the Tiananmen Square massacre. This self-censorship further cemented suspicions among Hongkongers that the press freedoms they enjoyed were buckling under tremendous pressure from Beijing.
Subsequent episodes of large-scale protest, including the Umbrella Movement in 2014, followed an inevitable logic. In October 2015, five staff members of the Causeway Bay Bookstore were abducted to mainland China by unidentified individuals and, as the public learned later on, were made to “cooperate with relevant investigations.” This bookstore specialized in selling books on mainland politics. The bold and unprecedented incident injected an aggravated sense of fear into Hongkongers: not only was their free expression threatened, their personal freedom could be at risk too.
A few months later, on March 15, 2016, I experienced just that. That afternoon, I had planned to board a flight from Beijing to Hong Kong to attend an academic event. At the Capital International Airport, I was escorted by four unidentified individuals into a sedan and detained in a small room in an unknown location. As I was shoved into the car, I thought: “How I wish I weren’t in China!” I was held for 19 days.
One of the interrogators asked me: Why do you write articles for Apple Daily? I had to tell the truth: Because the housing prices are high, and this newspaper pays well for articles. He asked: Are you only doing it for money? I replied: Yes, for money. Suddenly, he was enraged, interrupted me, and sternly said: “No! You’re writing for your ideals!” I was stunned, and could not think of a response.
For the next six months, I was not allowed to leave mainland China until the end of August that year, when I was permitted to travel to Macau. I was also warned not to write current affairs or political commentaries, nor to accept interviews from any foreign media. At the same time, my residency permit in Hong Kong was suspended, so I had to move to Shenzhen. However, no strict prohibition was placed on my crossing the border, so I often traveled to Hong Kong to buy books and meet friends.
One thing to keep in mind: Hong Kong, with its freedom of speech and publication, had up to that point preserved memories of key events in the recent history of Communist China that might otherwise have been lost. Books on the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Chinese Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square massacre had long been published and distributed in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was like the “Museum of Truth” for China. However, truth is the enemy of lies, and it would be ruthlessly suppressed by the creators of those lies. That was one of the reasons why my like-minded friends and myself predicted that Hong Kong’s situation would worsen.
Moreover, the authorities in Beijing saw Hong Kong as a gathering place for the voices of opposition. This is why Beijing repeatedly emphasizes that “Hong Kong people governing Hong Kong” comes with the condition that only “patriotic” Hongkongers are fit to lead the city. They have an instinctive wariness and distrust towards “freedom.”
In July 2017, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo died in prison. As the face of China’s democracy aspirations and a symbol of the Tiananmen movement, his sudden death was a huge symbolic blow. Since Tiananmen, there have been two main trends in China’s political transition movement. One is the gradual reform advocated by enlightened retired officials, intellectuals within the system, media personnel, and lawyers. The other is the political opposition advocated by independent liberal intellectuals as represented by Liu Xiaobo. The core difference between the two is whether they accept the leadership of the CCP.
However, Liu’s death and the subsequent expulsion and suppression of political opposition led to the disappearance of the “political opposition” track. Meanwhile, those advocating the reform path received a brutal reality check in the spring of 2018. During that year’s conference of the National People’s Congress, the Chinese constitution was amended to remove presidential term limits, making it possible for the President to serve a third term. This sparked intense discussions in China and abroad, and triggered a wave of emigration.
Looking back at the past forty years of China’s history, the phrase “reform and opening up” can be quite misleading. The political reform once advocated by the authorities suffered a heavy blow after 1989 and was then indefinitely shelved. Not only that, but the Party’s control over the government has only been strengthened under the slogan of “continuously strengthening the leadership of the Party.” After forty years of development, they have accumulated considerable experience, funds, technology, and advanced capabilities to continue maintaining high-pressure control. Moreover, on the ideological scene, nationalism and a narrow interpretation of patriotism have become increasingly prominent.
Those who lean liberal democracy tend to view the past forty years of China’s development through a progressive lens, with a false expectation as their goal. They had assumed that China would follow a linear and constantly upward trend in its development, and that China would continue to maintain an open posture. Now it seems that they were mistaken, and I used to be one of them. In the first half of my life, I actively worked with such an expectation in mind, much like a moth attracted to flame.
History is not always a story of progress. From the experience of Chinese history, there are too many instances of back-and-forth. Back then, the leader of the Boxer rebels, Zhu Hongdeng (朱红灯), led peasants in Shandong to topple Christmas trees and burn churches. Just like today, in Suzhou, the birthplace of the Japanese kimono, wearing a kimono can lead to questioning by the police and detention. When Mr. Shinzo Abe passed away, there was widespread jubilation on the Chinese internet, something that would have been almost unimaginable in the 1980s and 1990s.
Confucius said, “At forty, one achieves clarity.” In other words, when a person reaches the age of forty, they are able to discern right from wrong and have their own standards of judgment. My first half of life basically coincided with the period of reform and opening up in China over the past forty years. My life’s ups and downs have been almost entirely informed by the political evolution of China over the years. Taiwanese writer Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) once said, “How can a drop of water know the direction of the river and the sea?”
As I watch the world of yesterday continue to fade and drift further away from me, I do not feel greater loss or bewilderment. I only feel more pessimistic about China’s prospects. As a result, I confine myself to the small world constructed by an individual. As regards contemporary China, I have fewer and fewer words to say, and perhaps in the future, I will say nothing at all. Perhaps this is what the Buddhists call “great compassion without tears, great enlightenment without words.”
The Collapse of Yesterday’s World – A Chinese Millennial Journalist’s Chronicle of the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ That Never Was, Part One, Jia Jia, October 7, 2025
The Collapse of Yesterday’s World – A Chinese Millennial Journalist’s Chronicle of the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ That Never Was, Part Two, Jia Jia, October 15, 2025
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