[3] Before British Hong Kong's handover to the People's Republic of China by the United Kingdom in 1997, Ming Pao was considered hostile to the Chinese authority.

The merged group, named Media Chinese International Limited was dual-listed on the main boards of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong and the Bursa Malaysia Securities Berhad in April 2008.

In April 1997, the group set up a New York office and started publishing the Ming Pao US East Coast Edition (Chinese: 明報(美東版)).

[6] According to a 2013 report by the Center for International Media Assistance, this came after a number of newspapers, including Ming Pao Daily, were bought by business tycoons with interests in China and close ties to mainland officials before and after the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.

Chum Shun-kin said the story that was pulled contained details about the history of the massacre, including eyewitness accounts of the killing of civilians and information from diplomatic cables from Canada.

The pulling of the Tiananmen story has been criticised by some, including Civic Party lawmaker Claudia Mo who said that Chong appears to "want to shield Beijing from embarrassment, instead of acting in the interests of the public and protecting their right to information".

[18] The journal's executive chief editor, Keung Kwok-yuen (Chinese: 姜國元), was abruptly terminated on 20 April 2016, the same day that a report based on the Panama Papers was published on its front page.

[19][20] The timing of Keung's removal led to speculation that the Panama Papers report, which connected a number of influential individuals in the territory to tax havens abroad, may have been considered sensitive, thus being the real reason for the dismissal.

[19] Journalists at Ming Pao manifested the concern felt by the media at large, several of them protested by filed blank space reports in an edition the Sunday following the dismissal.