A decades-old political cartoon column has been scrapped by a respected Hong Kong newspaper after it faced a barrage of criticism from officials, in a move widely seen as a further blow to the city’s freedoms since the implementation of the controversial national security law.
On Thursday, the Ming Pao newspaper announced it would stop publishing cartoons by Wong Kei-kwan, better known under his nom de plume “Zunzi”, from Sunday.
“Ming Pao thanks Zunzi for bearing witness with us to the changing times over the past 40 years,” it said in a short statement.
Wong’s satirical cartoons on Hong Kong politics have been published in Ming Pao since 1983. His popular comic strips lampooned officials and politicians throughout the British colonial era and after the 1997 changeover of sovereignty to Chinese rule.
“I think the reason is widely understood by our readers and we all feel very sad about that,” Wong, 68, told the Guardian in a carefully worded response. “All we can do is to attempt to limit our fear. It was a mutual decision.”
Wong’s works have been criticised six times by government officials in the past six months, including by the police and the security bureau. Criticism from the secretary for home and youth affairs, Alice Mak, this week appeared to be the last straw.
Wong’s last comic, a three-panel strip published Tuesday, showed a man telling a woman that the city’s community representatives would be chosen “as long as the superior finds them suitable”, even if they have failed their exams and health tests.
The government last week announced a revamp of district councils, under which only 20% of all seats would be elected. The rest will be either appointed by the government or selected by committees staffed by pro-establishment figures. Mak called Wong’s cartoon strip “distorting” and “unethical”.
On Friday, a search of “Zunzi” on Hong Kong’s public library catalogue yielded no results. The Leisure and Cultural Services Department told Ming Pao newspaper that books were regularly inspected and those which allegedly violated national security were immediately removed.
Political satire – once commonplace and part of Hong Kong’s robust civil society – has become a dangerous pursuit under the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020 after months of anti-government protests. The law lays out penalties as severe as life imprisonment for crimes including secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces. The authorities have also reactivated the colonial-era offence of sedition to prosecute government critics.
Prof Chung Kim-wah, a social scientist formerly with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said government pressure had forced the city’s media outlets to either close or self-censor. He noted that Ming Pao had already cut some columns by authors seen as politically sensitive.
“Through law and force, the ones which would not be compromised, such as Apple Daily or Stand News, have been forced to close,” he said. “For Ming Pao, they’re exerting [pressure] to make it gradually change, and in the end it will become just like other [pro-establishment outlets].”
Both Apple Daily and Stand News shut down after their assets were frozen by police in 2021.
“They are comprehensively sabotaging Hong Kong’s civil society, which took decades to build,” Chung said.
Johnny Lau, an independent political commentator and veteran journalist, said the cull of Wong’s cartoons showed that political pressure had not only affected Hong Kong’s politics, education and press but popular culture as well.
“This is a landmark incident,” he said. “But official censorship of the arts, culture and literature can never be totally effective … the more they crack down, the more people will treasure them. They will go down in history.”
The chief of Hong Kong’s security bureau, Tang Ping-keung, said on Thursday that the pulling of Wong’s cartoons was a “responsible action” taken by editors if they didn’t want their platform to be used to mislead the public or “to incite dissatisfaction towards the government”.
