Hong Kong has refused to renew the visa of an Australian correspondent from The Economist, the newspaper's chief editor said, as authorities in the Chinese city tighten a crackdown on free speech and dissent.

Sue-lin Wong is at least the third foreign journalist working in Hong Kong to be forced out in recent years.

Press freedoms in the once-outspoken city have been reined in as China remoulds Hong Kong, following huge democracy protests in 2019 and Beijing's imposition of a strict national security law last year.

Wong, who is not currently in Hong Kong, was refused permission to return to work in the city, Zanny Minton Beddoes, the London-based weekly's chief editor, said in a statement on Friday.

"We regret their decision, which was given without explanation," she said.

"We urge the government of Hong Kong to maintain access for the foreign press, which is vital to the territory's standing as an international city," she added.

Beijing has been at loggerheads with both Britain and Australia in recent years over issues including trade and support for Hong Kong's democracy protesters.

Both Canberra and London have also relaxed residency requirements for Hong Kongers wanting to leave the city, angering Beijing.

Victor Mallet, then Asia news editor of the Financial Times, was barred from entering Hong Kong after his working visa renewal was turned down in 2018.

And New York Times correspondent Chris Buckley was denied a permit to Hong Kong last year after he was expelled from mainland China.

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Hong Kong last year reported "highly unusual" delays in visa approval for multiple media outlets.

On the authoritarian Chinese mainland, where the press is heavily controlled and censored, foreign journalists must apply for specific visas and face routine harassment.

Reporters only need a regular business visa to work in Hong Kong, however.

China promised key liberties and autonomy to Hong Kong ahead of Britain's handover in 1997, and the city has free press protections enshrined in law.

The Financial Times, AFP, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg are among multiple media organisations with regional headquarters there.

The New York Times has relocated some of its Asia hub to South Korea after multiple visa delays and the outright rejection of Buckley.

For local news outlets, consequences can be much more severe.

Earlier this year, Apple Daily, the city's most popular pro-democracy newspaper, closed down after its assets were frozen using the new national security law.

Six of its senior executives and editors, including its founder Jimmy Lai, have been remanded over charges of "collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security".

Chinese dissident artist defies Beijing in Italian show
Brescia, Italy (AFP) Nov 13, 2021 –

Exhibiting a torture instrument as an innocent rocking chair, Chinese dissident artist Badiucao mocks the propaganda of Beijing in a new show — while appropriating its codes.

Defying calls from the Chinese government to cancel it, the northern Italian city of Brescia is hosting the first international solo exhibition by the 35-year-old artist and exile from China who lives in Australia.

Badiucao's works are "full of anti-Chinese lies" that "jeopardise the friendly relations between China and Italy", charged Beijing's embassy in Rome in a letter sent last month to Brescia's town hall.

But the city stood its ground.

"None of us in Brescia, neither in the city council nor among the citizens, had the slightest doubt about this exhibition going ahead," Deputy Mayor Laura Castelletti told AFP.

Brescia, known for its Roman ruins, has a long tradition of welcoming dissidents, painters and writers, in the "defence of artistic freedom", she said.

The last was in 2019, with the works of Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan, who spent nearly three years in jail in Turkey.

The new show, "China is (not) near — works of a dissident artist", which opened Friday, denounces political repression in China and the country's censorship of the origins of the coronavirus, two explosive subjects for Beijing.

The exhibit, whose title is an allusion to a famous Italian film from 1967, "China Is Near", runs until February 13 at the Santa Giulia museum.

In an interview with AFP, Badiucao — who has been called "the Chinese Banksy" — said he was "very happy and proud" that the city "had the courage to say 'no' to China to defend fundamental rights."

– 'Death threats' –

"I want to use my art to expose the lies, to expose the problems of the Chinese government, to criticise the Chinese government, however on the other hand it's also celebrating the Chinese people, for how brave Chinese people are… even when they have been subjected to this very harsh environment with an authoritarian government," Badiucao said, speaking in English.

Plans for a Hong Kong show in 2018 fell through after pressure on the artist and his entourage, said the bespectacled Badiucao, who sports a long, shaggy beard.

"The national security police went to intimidate my family in Shanghai," he said, adding they threatened to "send officers" to the opening if the exhibit were held.

Among the works exhibited in Brescia that have provoked the ire of Beijing is a famous image of Chinese President Xi Jinping merged with the face of Carrie Lam, Hong Kong's chief executive, to illustrate the erosion of self-rule in the former British colony.

The Chinese Communist Party "thinks that all free artists are its enemies, that's why it hates me so much," said Badiucao, who added that he receives "daily death threats" on social media.

Due to heavy censorship, he said he only learned decades later as a university student studying law in China about the government's brutal 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.

He decided to dedicate himself to art, moving to Australia in 2009 and only revealing his identity publically on its 30th anniversary a decade later.

Another of his works depicts 64 watches painted with the artist's own blood, representing those given to Chinese soldiers, according to Badiucao, as a reward for their participation in the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown.

The exhibition also pays tribute to "Tank Man", the unknown man wearing a white shirt and carrying two plastic shopping bags who stood up to advancing tanks.

In a nod to current events, the tanks remodelled by Badiucao are topped by balls resembling the Covid-19 virus under a microscope.

– Sidestepping censors –

Hung on one of the museum's walls are pages from a diary of a resident of Wuhan, epicentre of the pandemic, who managed to circumvent the censorship to recount his daily life at the start of the confinement.

The dissident said there is no doubt Beijing is responsible for the pandemic, alleging that it failed to heed warnings over the coronavirus' first appearance in Wuhan in late 2019.

The exhibition "has no intention of offending the Chinese people or Chinese culture and civilisation", the president of the Brescia Museums Foundation, Francesca Bazoli, said.

In showing these works, she added, "we support freedom of expression".