As Hong Kong’s global reputation as the Asian bastion of free speech and the rule of law has been tarnished over the past few years, so too has its role as the region’s international media hub — and one of the biggest beneficiaries from this decline has been the self-governed island of Taiwan.

The clampdown on foreign media by Chinese authorities — with reporters and editors being denied working visas both on the mainland and in the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong — has helped spur the move to Taiwan.

The drain from Hong Kong — whose Foreign Correspondents’ Club once boasted the region’s biggest cohort of overseas journalists — has been accelerated by last year’s imposition of the national security law. The law, which aims to snuff out once-tolerated dissent, effectively creates a new risk of criminalization for many of the once-legitimate activities of reporters.

Reporters barred from accessing the mainland have settled down in Taiwan in the past year, U.S. publicly funded broadcaster Voice of America reported on Monday.

Thirty-four new foreign journalists were registered in 2020 — 21 of them were U.S. nationals, according to Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs data. Several of these had originally been posted to mainland China for the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

“People are slowly realizing that covering China from Taiwan is not impossible,” said William Yang, vice president of the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club, adding that the landscape of the island’s foreign media had changed as a result. “Some foreign media in Taiwan are indeed thinking about whether they will have some longer-term plans here.”

The shakeup in the media landscape hasn’t just affected Taiwan. The New York Times announced last July plans to move its Hong Kong-based digital news operation to Seoul, describing the move as a “significant shift by an American news organization as China has stepped up its efforts to impede the affairs of the Asian metropolis.”

The U.S. news outlet added that the national security law “unsettled news organizations and created uncertainty about the city’s prospects as a hub for journalism in Asia.”

The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post were also reportedly considering moving resources to other bureaus outside Hong Kong.

The denial of visas to American journalists “was a bilateral issue between the U.S. and China which can no longer be resolved by the news organizations themselves,” said an American journalist who moved from Beijing to Taipei last year. “I don’t see any signs that the Chinese government would relax the restrictions and let American journalists return to China.”

The journalist also cautioned about the difficulties reporting mainland China from Taiwan: It is harder to build up trust with interviewees over the phone, and thus more difficult to portray the true picture of the Chinese people.

“If the Chinese government is willing to open up and change its policy, we will definitely send some reporters in Taiwan back to China. But we will also keep some reporters in Taiwan because it has revealed to us its importance in its own way,” he said.

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