Opinion | The legends of Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club

The FCC, which has made Hong Kong its home since 1949 as a canary in China’s coal mine, has been criticised for both malign opposition and craven surrender to Chinese authority here

For a city which aspires to continue to be an international financial centre, the FCC’s demise would seem to be an act of self-harm that no authority should knowingly commit

Reading Time:4 minutes

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Central, Hong Kong. Photo: Felix Wong

Published: 4:06pm, 1 Jun 2022Updated: 8:06pm, 1 Jun 2022

At the end of the great spy novelist John Le Carre’s Hong Kong story The Honourable Schoolboy, a legendary 1970s character at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club has a furious argument over “a silly point of club protocol” – the process of paying bills with chits.

“You won’t stop the wheel, not together, not divided, you snivelling a***-licking novices!” he tells them as he storms out.

The debate on Monday night at the FCC’s annual general meeting was over a more fundamental matter: How to maintain a seven-decade tradition of advocating for press freedom at a time when authorities are bringing sedition charges against journalists in Hong Kong.

Like the city that has been its home since 1949, it has been a difficult few years for the FCC.

The coronavirus pandemic and the Hong Kong protests have crushed many less and more renowned of the fragrant harbour’s establishments, but in this chapter of history, the club has made it into the news itself, most recently with international headlines accusing it of self-censorship by cancelling (and then giving away) the Human Rights Press Awards it had founded and run for 26 years with the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) and Amnesty International.