The crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong has driven many university students away from journalism studies, but it has motivated at least one student to redouble her commitment to a journalistic career.

The young woman, who gave her name only as Kenus, is devoting herself to journalism in Hong Kong even though she is certain the industry has no future in the city. Further, her parents want to emigrate to Britain.

Kenus, who works as a reporter part-time, tells her parents “you should at least let me try for a few years,” she said. Civil liberties in Hong Kong have been curtailed by the authorities since the national security law was imposed by Beijing last June.

She decided to embark on journalism in 2016, the year when police violence was first used against anti-government protesters and lawmakers were first disqualified from the city’s semi-democratic legislature.

“I started to care about social affairs, and I felt very angry and anxious about the [direction of] society,” Kenus said. “That was when I first wanted to be a reporter.”

Kenus became a part-time reporter covering current affairs in September 2019, amid the mass pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. She was soon assigned to cover the street confrontations.

Her sense of dedication is shared by a dwindling cadre of students. The number of journalism graduates has been declining since 2016 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University, according to their statistics.

CUHK and HKBU were among the first post-secondary institutions to establish journalism faculties in the former British colony.

Bruce Lui, a senior journalism lecturer at HKBU, said “now is really a testing time for every [journalism student], as to their perseverance in terms of the ideals and values they believe in.” Some students personally witnessed the authorities’ suppression of media freedoms during the 2019 anti-government protest movement, he noted.

Despite her family’s plan to emigrate to Britain to escape Hong Kong’s political conditions, Kenus declared, “no matter how bad the situation is, it can’t stop me from wanting to be a reporter.”

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