Rainy Saturday morning at home in Singapore, July 2024. The Birds’ Nest Fern in the foreground, with leaves more than a metre long, appeared from out of the blue and made itself at home more than ten years ago.

Me

I am a professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University’s School of Communication, writing on media and politics. You can contact me via the form at the bottom of my bio page.

Main interests

Hate propaganda and polarisation: Intolerance and hate in politics, and the struggle to counter it through media and communication. More

Media freedom and censorship: Journalism and democracy, especially in illiberal and autocratic states. More

Academic freedom and institutions: Constraints on universities and obstacles to globalisation and dewesternisation. More

Singapore media and politics: The governing party’s authoritarian resilience and hegemonic control of the public sphere. More

Hate and Polarisation

Fighting Polarisation: Shared Communicative Spaces in Divided Democracies looks at how projects around the world are trying to transcend “us-them” divides through innovative media and communication processes that connect communities and construct more inclusive publics in divided societies. It will be published by Polity Press in 2025.

Would you like to join my mailing list for updates about this book, including launch events and preview sections? If so, please sign up below. Your email address won’t be used for anything else.

Covering Hate Speech: A Guide for Journalists is a commissioned report published by UNESCO for use in media training and development work. In it, I argue for a new approach to covering hate, based on professional journalism’s traditional strengths and codes of ethical practice. Instead of getting carried away by the latest hate speech controversy, media should apply its investigative skills to reveal who benefits from long-term hate propaganda and how it operates. The publication can be downloaded from UNESCO’s library here.

Hate speech regulation in Asia. I am writing a chapter on this topic for the Oxford Handbook of Hate Speech, edited by Eric Heinze, Tom Herrenberg et. al. I will show how, in the absence of strong equality protections, hate speech laws in many Asian jurisdictions end up being abused by dominant groups to sharpen oppression of vulnerable communities.

More of my work on hate propaganda can be found on this page and my list of publications.

Media freedom and censorship

Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship is a global study of 21st century censorship as experienced by political cartoonists around the world. It is rendered entirely in graphic form, in collaboration with comic book artist Sonny Liew. Visit our website.

MIT Press has made these excerpts freely accessible: “An Illustrated Guide to Post-Orwellian Censorship” and the story of Jewish American cartoonist Eli Valley’s battles with pro-Zionist forces in the United States.

Red Lines was honoured as one of the top three books in two categories — Media & Cultural Studies and Graphic Nonfiction — by the Association of American Publishers PROSE Awards for scholarly works published in 2021.

Other recent works

Performative censorship: Why some free speech conflicts should be taken seriously but not literally, Media, Culture & Society, 2024.
“Cartoons”, to be published in the Encyclopedia of Political Communication, edited by A. Nai, M. Grömping & D Wirz (Edward Elgar). Accepted manuscript available at SSRN.

Press freedom in Hong Kong. I look at long-term trends in Hong Kong media freedom, in collaboration with my PhD student Cheng Yujia, and Agnes Lam of CUHK. Am also working on a chapter for the 2nd edition of The National Security Law in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong media freedom, two years after the crackdown. My colleagues and I have tabulated incidents related to Hong Kong’s media freedom since the promulgation of the National Security Law. View the archive.

Hong Kong’s Ming Pao carried this profile and interview on 12 June 2022. I talked about regulating misinformation, and why the Hong Kong government should focus more on the polarised city’s trust deficit than on its truth deficit. – Read the interview (in Chinese).

At a HKU Law Faculty conference on Hong Kong’s National Security Law, I spoke about what we can learn from comparative censorship studies.

Academic freedom

Mainly as part of the collective AcademiaSG, I have been writing and speaking about academic freedom in Singapore.

AcademiaSG submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education, cited in her report to the UN Human Rights Council session of June-July 2024.
I recount my own experience in Singapore and subsequent developments in the country in “From scandal to business as usual: normalising controls over academia”, an essay in AcademiaSG series, Occupational Hazards.
More reports, including our survey of Singapore-based academics, here.
My May 2024 talk at the AcamediaSGs Knowledge Praxis conference, on how bibliometrics undermine local scholarship, can be viewed here.

“The tyranny of university rankings and bibliometrics”, a presentation at AcademiSG’s May 2024 Knowledge Praxis Conference.

Promoting Chinese journalism research. Through the Centre for Media and Communication Research, I am facilitating my colleagues’ new initiative to set up a Chinese Journalism Studies Network. More information here.

Global diversity in media studies: Read the text of my talk on this subject at the International Communication Association 2022 conference, and a blog analysing the field’s top-ranked journals.

Singapore

I spoke at the Institute of Policy Studies conference on 20 January 2025. The full text can be read here.

In October 2022, I gave the closing talk at the 5th Singapore Literary Festival in New York City. This biennial event is organised by Singapore Unbound.

Selected commentaries

Singapore’s unique, troubled Presidency. Constitutional law academic Kevin Tan and I explain why Singapore’s directly elected Presidency is a flawed institution. Read the article.

Historyogi Podcast: The history & effects of Singapore’s media regulation policies.

World Press Freedom Day: Outnumbered and outgunned, public-interest journalism is losing to identity politics. Current media systems have no answer for toxic polarisation. A public service internet and public service media need to be on the agenda. My commentary for 360info.org.

Singapore’s media system overhaul: Singapore’s news media giant SPH will go non-profit, marking the end of the PAP government’s neoliberal approach to suppressing the press. It will use public funds instead. ⁦Read my commentary.

Ukraine and big power rivalry – Why the urge to ‘compare rottenness’ will lead Singapore nowhere: Chong Ja Ian, Walid Jumblatt Abdullah and I probe the tendency among some Singaporeans to treat the crisis in Ukraine as an occasion to assert their values and allegiances in an identity war between the West and the Rest. Read our commentary.

Race and the PAP: A chapter from PAP v PAP on the what needs to change in Singapore’s management of cultural diversity.

A call for clean online campaigning: Singapore’s online falsehoods law fails to regulate social media manipulation by the ruling party. Read this call for more transparency by a multidisciplinary team of experts.

More commentaries on Singapore can be found in my Air-Conditioned Natio n blog and the AcademiaSG website.

Teaching

At HKBU, I teach undergraduate and masters courses on journalism and society, plus a PhD course on freedom of expression and censorship. In 2023, I taught a media/politics course for Germany’s Studienstiftung summer academy. I led the Media, Culture and Society intro course for Stanford’s Department of Communication in the Fall of 2022. My PhD students work on topics in the broad area of media and politics.