Wall St. Journal Reporter Says She Was Fired Over Hong Kong Union Post

A Wall Street Journal reporter in Hong Kong said on Wednesday that she had been fired over her role as the leader of a journalists’ trade union that has come under attack by the territory’s pro-Beijing leaders.

The reporter, Selina Cheng, who covered the rise of electric vehicles in China after joining the paper in 2022, was elected chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association in June. In a news conference on Wednesday, she said her dismissal called into question The Journal’s commitment to protecting media freedoms.

The paper’s top leaders, she said, were preventing employees “from advocating for freedoms The Journal’s reporters rely on to work, in a place where journalists and their rights are under threat.”

A spokesman for Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal,said in a statement that it did not comment on individual personnel matters. It said that the newspaper “has been and continues to be a fierce and vocal advocate for press freedom in Hong Kong and around the world.”

Freedom of speech, once a hallmark of Hong Kong that separated it from the Chinese mainland, has been curtailed since Beijing cracked down after huge antigovernment protests roiled the city in 2019.

Independent news outlets critical of the Hong Kong authorities have been raided and shuttered. Editors have been put behind bars during lengthy trails. A survey by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong found that 70 percent of journalists in the city have engaged in self-censorship.