Internet users in Hong Kong have been unable to access a Zaobao article describing how U.S. President Joe Biden called Chinese president Xi Jinping a “dictator”.
Radio Free Asia (RFA), a U.S. government-funded news agency that wrote a report on the above. More interestingly, they described Zaobao as a “pro-China Singapore newspaper”.
Additionally, RFA revealed that Zaobao’s articles mentioning the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the recent arrests of Hong Kongers commemorating it in public were also allegedly unavailable to Hong Kong readers.
Zaobao is one of the few foreign media outlets that is distributed in China.
Lianhe Zaobao’s “contact us” section also shows that the paper is distributed in Beijing and Shanghai.
They were also the first to feature a street interview of Peng Shuai when the world thought she went missing. Peng Shuai is China’s tennis player. In 2021, she made made allegations about sexual assault by Zhang Gaoli, a retired Chinese vice-premier and high-ranking CCP member on Weibo. Peng did not communicate on social media afterwards and was not reachable by the WTA, until she retracted her claims in the video shared by Zaobao.
Zaobao is under SPH Media Trust. It seems that even our state media is not free from foreign intervention. Why is FICA not used?
