Each July marks the anniversary of the end of British rule not just in the United States but also – halfway around the world – in the Asian territory of Hong Kong. The former has gone on to celebrate 250 years of independence and democracy; the latter became part of China when the British left 29 years ago.
Under the 1997 “one country, two systems” handover, Hong Kong was to exist as a special administrative region, maintaining a wide range of political, press, economic, and other freedoms. And many, if not most, Hong Kongers would prefer to keep it that way, holding on to their freewheeling traditions of democracy and debate.
“In China’s huge city boulevards … my thoughts always felt imprisoned, but in Hong Kong’s narrow streets and tiny, cramped bookshops they were set free,” an exiled mainland Chinese writer once wrote.
But after several years of tighter control by China’s authoritarian government, Hong Kongers are joining forces – online and otherwise, with Chinese on the mainland and around the world – to find ways to protect freedom of thought and speech. China has imposed a sweeping national security law and forcefully put down widespread protests related to COVID-19. This year, it sentenced media activist Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison and recently arrested owners of two independent bookstores. The charges: carrying “seditious” publications – such as a biography of Mr. Lai and George Orwell’s “1984.”
Meanwhile, the territory’s Beijing-backed chief executive, John Lee, is seeking to burnish the image of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. In conjunction with handover commemorations, he kicked off a campaign to enhance Hong Kongers’ “understanding of the significant accomplishments” of the ruling party.
The combination of heavy-handed security tactics and info wars hints at Beijing’s ongoing concerns about civilian dissent throughout the country. The government spends an estimated $200 billion per year on “stability maintenance,” or close monitoring of its citizens. But even with artificial intelligence tools, there are limits to what it can do.
Between January and April this year, the online China Dissent Monitor documented 1,396 protests. Last August, in the city of Chongqing, large-scale political slogans were projected onto a high-rise building – “Freedom is not something bestowed; we must fight to reclaim it.” And “We want truth, not lies.”
“The ingenuity of human expression can still outpace the seemingly superior machine,” according to a 2026 assessment by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Chinese citizens operating on Western platforms are now communicating in plain language, rather than “using the homophones and wordplay common inside China,” the report noted. “Doing so limits the regime’s ability to harvest more coded-language datasets … to train its censorship AI system.”
One such social media account, operated by Italy-based exile Li Ying, is of special concern to Beijing. Its 2 million followers in China regularly feed it fact-checked, uncensored images and videos of daily life through encrypted channels.
“My work is about bringing to light the voices of ordinary people,” Mr. Li told the Financial Times in May. “The point of my work is to build trust.”
And, for a government that often exercises power by sowing division and distrust among its people, “I suppose that is dangerous,” he concluded.