MIRANDA PAK WRITES – Imagine a Hong Kong taxi driver’s income shrinking significantly because he cannot speak Mandarin. This scenario is one of five short films in the Hong Kong indie movie Ten Years. The local, low budget film visualizes Hong Kong in 2025, “[depicting a radicalized] future in which…
MIRANDA PAK WRITES – The U.S. this week (Feb. 2) joined calls for Chinese authorities to release five Hong Kong booksellers whose main crime appears to have been embarrassing Communist Party officials. What’s proving the bigger embarrassment is that no one doubts it is Beijing behind the kidnapping/detentions. Since October,…
MIRANDA PAK WRITES – Today, it’s not uncommon for people to rely on cloud or file-sharing services, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, to store documents. A ‘cloud’ is basically a service where people make an account and upload documents and, once uploaded, they can be accessed anywhere on any device with Internet connection.…
MIRANDA PAK WRITES – A year ago, as he perceived local media outlets to be bowing to editorial pressure from the mainland, British expat Tom Grundy thought Hong Kong could use an independent English-language news source. Spurred by events surrounding the Umbrella Movement, the Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) became…
MIRANDA PAK WRITES — The bad news just keeps flowing for Hong Kong’s media. Recently, the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government (LOCPG) has taken control of Sino United Publishing Limited. This publishing company owns Joint Publishing HK, Chung Hwa Book Co., and the Commercial Press, which are the three…
MIRANDA PAK WRITES – Everything must come to an end, including Hong Kong’s oldest TV station, Asia Television (ATV). ATV will have to stop broadcasting starting April 1st, 2016. Hong Kong’s Executive Council said they won’t renew ATV’s free-to-air license when it expires on November 30th of this year. ATV strove to…
MIRANDA PAK WRITES – Twitter, which has been blocked in China since 2009, opened an office in Hong Kong on March 10. Tweeting was blocked in China because officials were worried that citizens would use social media for their own benefit and plan large anti-government protests. Despite what many people think,…
MIRANDA PAK WRITES- With all the tension and protests in Hong Kong, it’s not surprising that media censorship is on the rise. Two recent reports show the decline of Hong Kong’s press freedom. The PEN American Center, a literary society and human rights organization, released a report stating that media self-censorship…
MIRANDA PAK WRITES- An annual report on the state of press freedom in China offers little to cheer about for fans of Western style journalism and media openness. The report “China’s Media War: Censorship, Corruption & Control” outlines dozens of instances of direct censorship, Internet surveillance, abuse of legal processes,…
