HONG KONG — A former top official in Hong Kong continued his clash with the city’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club over its plans to host a talk by the head of a pro-independence political party, asking Tuesday why the government should allow the club to lease a publicly owned building.

The dispute could prove a significant test of the limits of free speech in Hong Kong, a former British colony that returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Hong Kong operates as a semiautonomous “special administrative region” under a model of “one country, two systems,” but many residents worry about the deterioration of civil rights under the influence of China’s authoritarian central government.

Leung Chun-ying, who served as Hong Kong’s chief executive from 2012 to 2017, has complained about the club’s decision to host a talk by Andy Chan, the founder of the Hong Kong National Party, which the government is seeking to ban.

Mr. Leung said Tuesday in a Facebook post that he believed the club had a “special deal” with the government on the lease for the building it occupies in downtown Hong Kong, and that other organizations should be able to bid for it.