Hong Kong's Vanishing Rainbow Shows How China's Social Control Travels

Published in The Diplomat, 22 October 2026. From Hong Kong's cancelled Pride events to Bangkok, Paris, Taiwan and North America, LGBTQ communities are meeting censorship, surveillance and coercive pressure linked to China. This commentary reads Hong Kong's vanishing rainbow as a revealing case: social control narrowing autonomous public life by administrative means, and travelling across borders through people, platforms and Chinese-language communities far beyond China's territory.