February 20, 2025
HONG KONG – The potential closure of a prominent Hong Kong polling institute has renewed concerns about the erosion of information transparency in the city under its national security law.
The Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (Pori) announced on Feb 13 that it would “suspend all its self-funded research activities indefinitely, or even close down”.
The independent organisation, which has been in operation since 1991, tracks public sentiment in Hong Kong on broad topics including economic satisfaction, social well-being and trust levels towards the city’s politicians.
The announcement came a month after Pori’s chief executive Robert Chung and other employees were questioned by Hong Kong’s national security police, which is in charge of safeguarding national security, in a probe into whether they or the institute had helped an absconder.
The news also came the same week that British-born Hong Kong activist investor David Webb said he would shut down his popular database website as he battles cancer.
Mr Webb’s free online database Webb-site.com, which has been in operation since 1998, tracks information in Hong Kong such as corporate filings. His research into corporate wrongdoing had previously triggered regulatory investigations.
Political commentators interviewed by The Straits Times expressed regret at the impending shutdown of both platforms, noting that they played an important role in promoting the open flow of information and raising the level of public discourse in Hong Kong.
“Pori’s potential closure is a big setback to the growth of civil society, and a big loss to journalists and scholars who study the political and social developments of Hong Kong,” Mr Chris Yeung, founder of independent opinion platform Voice of Hong Kong, told ST.
The veteran journalist said Pori’s instant polls on topics such as the city’s budget, policy address and Hong Kongers’ sense of identity provided “important information to analyse the complex and subtle changes” in society.
“Pori has played a significant role in promoting political participation and civic awareness in Hong Kong since the 1990s,” Mr Yeung said.
“With credibility and authority, the results of its opinion surveys have previously put pressure on the government for it to be more accountable and responsive to public aspirations.”
The polling institute’s announcement on its website said it had “always been law-abiding, but in the current environment, it has to pause its promotion of scientific polling”.
The statement alluded to how the authorities have narrowed the space for civil society after a national security law took effect in Hong Kong in 2020, according to Professor John Burns, emeritus professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong (HKU).
It is an “alarming development” for the independent research body, he said.
“Pori has played a very important role over the years in informing the government and community of the public sentiment,” Prof Burns told ST.
“The government needs to meet the expectations of the community, and officials can learn of these expectations via Pori’s credible, scientifically conducted and publicly available polls.”
The national security law was first imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing in June 2020, after social unrest from months-long, sometimes violent, anti-government protests in 2019. Hong Kong enacted its own complementary version of the law in March 2024.
Pori’s work has “put it in the crosshairs of the government for a long time”, more recently with its surveys on Hong Kongers’ views on the city’s Covid-19 pandemic measures, local elections and the extent to which they support democracy, the academic said.
In 2020 and 2021, police raided Pori’s office after it helped pro-democracy activists organise an informal primary election.
The poll had been conducted in July 2020 to help the opposition camp narrow down the number of candidates it would field in the Legislative Council elections later that year.
“Pori has been increasingly cautious in view of the national security law, changing some of its survey questions or dropping certain questions altogether,” Prof Burns added.
In June 2023, the institute said it would stop releasing its survey results on some sensitive topics, such as views on China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, after receiving “suggestions” from government departments.
Security minister Chris Tang on Jan 13 said Pori’s CEO, Dr Chung, had been roped in to help with “investigations on suspected assistance to an absconder”.
“This has nothing to do with any research being done by Chung or his organisation. It has absolutely nothing to do with the result of their polls,” Mr Tang told the media.
Hong Kong police told ST on Feb 18 that the case involving Dr Chung was still under investigation and that no arrest had been made so far.
Police have not disclosed the absconder’s identity, but Dr Chung has been taken in twice by police to help with their probe since Pori’s former deputy CEO Chung Kim-wah was added to a wanted list in December 2024 for allegedly breaching the national security law. The latter, an outspoken commentator, has relocated to Britain since 2022.
Mr Webb’s note on his non-profit website on Feb 12 also referred to a “post-national security law environment”, under which a plan to move his database to HKU where it could be expanded with other researchers’ datasets was eventually rejected.
“The centre (housing the database) would have been apolitical, expressing no opinion other than to advocate accessibility of public data,” wrote Mr Webb, 59, a University of Oxford-educated former investment banker.
After that plan fell through, and with only months to live from battling prostate cancer since 2020, he is now working towards shutting down his platform “rather than leave managing it as a burden for my family”, he added.
Pori, meanwhile, seems to be holding out hope, saying in a statement on its website that it is “actively exploring all possible options”.
Discussing the institute’s possible shutdown, veteran political commentator Johnny Lau cited a quote by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978.
“Mr Deng said he was most worried about social silence; he was afraid that ‘the voice of the people would not be heard’,” said Mr Lau, who regularly contributes columns on current affairs to the city’s local media.
“If Pori has to shut, Hong Kong would lose not just an avenue for people to publicly reflect their sentiment, but also an important feedback mechanism for officials in their policymaking procedure.”
- Magdalene Fung is The Straits Times’ Hong Kong correspondent. She is a Singaporean who has spent about a decade living and working in Hong Kong.