The locals had few illusions, back in 1997, when I spent a week in Hong Kong during the days just before the handover ceremonies that put one of Asia’s most important cities under the control of Chinese authorities.

The purpose of my trip was to attend a conference about religion and the news (click here for the text of my presentation during that event), so it was understandable that participants talked to quite a few leaders in Hong Kong’s diverse and prominent religious community.

But that really didn’t matter. Secular human-rights people I met were saying the same things as the church leaders. They were all digging into the fine details of the new Special Administrative Region's Basic Law and seeing ominous loopholes.

Article 23, for example, was causing concern, with its language stating that Hong Kong's new leaders "shall enact laws ... to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition (or) subversion against the Central People's Government, ... to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies".”

Did that include the Vatican? Would Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans and others be allowed to maintain ties to their global fellowships or communions?

Global issues were sure to surface, activists told me. But that would not be the first place where the hammer would fall. Activists warned that free-speech issues would be the first war zone — free speech about politics, of course, but also about religion, an area of life that troubled government leaders.

This brings me to a recent New York Times feature — a mix of text and graphics — that ran under this headline: “What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong.” Surely this story about the impact of new laws in Hong Kong would address religious speech issues as well as politics? Here is a crucial summary:

The police have since arrested more than 20 people under the new law, which lays out political crimes punishable by life imprisonment in serious cases, and allows Beijing to intervene directly if it wants.

Hong Kong was once a bastion of free speech. It served as a base for the international news media and for rights groups, and as a haven for political refugees, including the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. Books on sensitive political topics that are banned in mainland China found a home in the city’s bookstores.