Corporate Rhetoric and Asian Realities

When Western media corporations preach the gospel of liberty to distant authoritarian states, the rhetoric is always flawless. The practice, as a Hong Kong magistrate recently demonstrated, can be considerably more awkward. Dow Jones Publishing, the corporate parent of the Wall Street Journal, has been convicted in Hong Kong for attempting to deter one of its journalists from leading a local press union.

The case stems from the July 2024 dismissal of Selina Cheng, a reporter covering China’s energy and automotive sectors. Weeks after Cheng assumed the chairmanship of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the oldest trade union representing news workers in the city, the newspaper eliminated her position under the tidy explanation of corporate restructuring. Outside the courtroom, Cheng pointed out that if employment protections fail reporters, safe journalistic work becomes an impossibility.

Principal magistrate David Cheung found the company guilty of preventing and deterring an employee from exercising trade union rights, though he acquitted the publisher on the secondary charge of firing her specifically for those activities. The maximum penalty for the infraction stands at HK$100,000, roughly $12,750—a sum that will barely register on the publisher's balance sheet. Sentencing is expected to be handed down at a later date.

What proved far costlier was the exposure of internal editorial risk management. Before her termination, Cheng’s supervisor explicitly instructed her that staff should not be viewed as advocating for press freedom in places like Hong Kong, framing her union duties as a potential conflict of interest and demanding prior firm approval. The defence argued during trial that Cheng was let go due to genuine redundancy and accused her of acting in bad faith. Magistrate Cheung rejected that line, describing Cheng as an honest and reliable witness while concluding that Dow Jones had wrongfully and unjustifiably applied its own code of conduct.

The irony is hard to miss. At the time of the dismissal, the publisher issued an official statement insisting that The Wall Street Journal has been and continues to be a fierce and vocal advocate for press freedom in Hong Kong and around the world.

Yet inside Hong Kong’s deteriorating media landscape, where the city dropped from 73rd on Reporters Without Borders' index in 2019 to 140th by 2026 following Beijing’s 2020 national security law, foreign news outlets have historically enjoyed greater leeway than domestic operations. Legal experts like Eric Lai of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law observed that the publisher set an exceptionally troubling precedent by penalizing an employee for exercising constitutional rights. When corporate compliance offices decide that standing up for press freedom presents too much operational friction, one must ask what value those corporate declarations of principle actually hold.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com