A Cantonese language advocacy group in Hong Kong stopped operations after local officials raided the family house of its chairman last week over an essay published three years ago.

It’s the latest sign of waning freedoms in Hong Kong, since a sweeping national security law was passed in 2020 that has since been used to curtail civil liberties in the city and stamp out anything perceived as a critique of or threat to Beijing’s expanding influence in the former British colony-turned-Chinese enclave.

Andrew Lok Han Chan, the chair and founder of Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis (SLHK)—which formed in 2013 and has advocated for the preservation of Cantonese or Guangdonghua, a language with origins in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong (formerly called Canton) and also widely used in Hong Kong and Macau—announced on Facebook on Monday that he was disbanding the group “effective immediately,” to “ensure the safety of my family and former members.”

Under Xi Jinping’s rule, as China has increasingly repressed Hong Kong’s freedoms and identity, Tsang says, Hongkongers have viewed identifying with Cantonese as a means to push back.

The SLHK’s shutdown falls in line with Xi’s other measures to increase the city’s swift integration with China, Tsang adds: “Dissent that can be seen as posing any kind of challenge to the CCP’s authority is no longer permitted in Hong Kong."

In 2016, the dystopian film “Ten Years”—which depicted a Hong Kong that has Mandarin as the dominant language—was reportedly banned from Chinese public screenings at Beijing’s behest.

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