; (2) the passage and implementation of legislation which severely curtails press freedom in Hong Kong, including the National Security Law of June 2020 and Article 23 of the Basic Law of March 2024, both of which pose an existential threat to the city’s tradition of press freedom; (3) harassment, intimidation, arrest, and imprisonment of journalists in Hong Kong, including the arrest and subsequent conviction of journalist and outspoken democracy advocate Jimmy Lai, as well as the closure of his once widely popular Chinese-language newspaper, Apple Daily; (4) arrests or other repressive actions against independent journalists and others in mainland China attempting to share uncensored news or opinion about current affairs, including Sophia Huang Xueqin, who has written about women’s rights and the protests in Hong Kong, was detained arbitrarily in September 2021, and went on trial in September 2023 on charges of inciting subversion of state power , and whose current status remains unknown, and citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who provided uncensored news regarding the COVID outbreak in Wuhan and has been imprisoned since May 2020 on politically motivated charges of picking quarrels and provoking trouble ; (5) the detention of journalists critical of the Government of the PRC, including Ruan Xiaohuan, who, after blogging about programming and politics, was sentenced to a 7-year term of imprisonment in early 2023, following 21 months of detention; and (6) the continued detention of Uyghur journalists, who account for nearly 50 percent of imprisoned journalists in the PRC, including Ilham Tohti, founder of the news website Uighurbiz, who was detained in 2014 and is serving a life sentence