This blog is authored by Mark Clifford, President of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation and author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic”
Lai became one of the first targets under the new law, on Monday, August 10, 2020, six weeks after the imposition of the National Security Law. When he had been arrested before, he had enjoyed polite treatment—invited through his lawyers to appear at the police station for booking or, when officers came to the house, given time to take a shower before being gently escorted into a waiting vehicle. In the August arrest, Lai’s hands were handcuffed behind his back, and he was manhandled by the arresting officers. Hong Kong’s strict Covid restrictions on social distancing were ignored as police staged a performance for the photographers whom they had tipped off to assemble outside Lai’s house.
Police bundled Lai into a police vehicle and drove him the ten miles to Apple Daily offices in Tseung Kwan O’s industrial park. Two hundred and fifty armed police had raided the building earlier that morning. They filed through the lobby, past the busts of Lai’s freedom heroes that graced the entrance—John Cowperthwaite, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. They marched up the long curving stairs from the lobby to the third-floor newsroom.
Police escorted Lai into an elevator and perp-walked him through the maze of editorial desks and cubicles. Apple Daily’s journalists knew that they were witnessing a global news story. Employees livestreamed arguments between journalists and police as cops searched the office and carted away thirty boxes of material. Staff uploaded photos and videos—many of these were sent by employees hiding in the women’s locker room and toilet.Police frantically hunted for the newspaper’s servers so that they could shut down the site. The year earlier the paper had moved everything to the cloud; the Washington Post–designed ARC content management system now hosted Apple Daily on Amazon servers outside of Hong Kong. ARC staff jumped in to help switch operational control to the Apple Daily journalists in Taiwan. “By the time they figured out how the system worked and asked us to shut it down, it was too late,” remembers Mark Simon. “We said, ‘We cannot—it’s being run from Taiwan.’”
All of Hong Kong watched the unfolding drama in real time. A reporter asked Lai, as police steered him to his office, “Mr. Lai, what should we do?” Lai responded with a pithy six-character Cantonese phrase: “They’ve cooked us a meal, we just have to eat it.”
With Lai still in custody, the paper responded defiantly. On Tuesday, a front-page headline proclaimed, “Apple Will Definitely Keep Fighting.” The paper increased its press run eightfold, selling 550,000 copies. The stock price hit a twelve-year high, soaring twelvefold the week of the raid as supporters rallied behind the company.
China’s central government—always quick to condemn others commenting on judicial proceedings—applauded Lai’s arrest, saying he “must be severely punished according to the law for colluding with external forces to endanger national security.” Lai and others “have long been acting as political agents of foreign and external forces, assisting them in interfering in Hong Kong affairs, and carrying out acts of secession, subversion, infiltration, and sabotage against China,” contended a spokesperson for the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office.
Official government newspaper China Daily paraphrased a government spokesperson who accused Lai of “plotting, organizing, and launching a series of illegal activities.” The unnamed spokesperson from the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office claimed that Lai used his newspapers and magazines “to create and spread rumors, and fan and support violence.” The spokesperson also said that “Lai provided financial support for anti-China elements and forces advocating ‘Hong Kong independence.’ Punishing Lai and other law breakers under the law is essential to uphold the rule of law.” Released in the early hours of August 12, after more than forty hours in custody, Lai’s staff greeted him with sustained applause and a bouquet of flowers when he appeared in the newsroom later that day. The front page of Thursday’s Apple Daily featured Lai sharing an emotional embrace with Cheung Kim-hung, the group’s chief executive officer and the newspaper’s former editor-in-chief. Cheung and Next Digital chief operating officer Royston Chow had also been arrested Monday, although they were both released later that day. Cheung appeared to shrug off the detention. Not Chow, who said later that week that the experience had shattered him. “They almost broke me,” he confessed when we spoke at the end of that week at the company’s annual general meeting.
Police also arrested Lai’s sons from his first marriage, forty-four-year-old Tim and thirty-nine-year-old Ian, on national security and fraud charges. Neither lived with Lai and neither was involved with his business. Tim was a technology entrepreneur, and Ian ran the well-regarded Sushi Kuu Japanese restaurant. Both posted bail and were released; four years later, no charges have been filed but authorities continue to hold their passports and they must report to the police regularly.
Lai appeared unfazed. He told colleagues that his overnight stay in the police station hadn’t been as bad as sleeping on a desk or chair at the factory when he first arrived in Hong Kong. In July, Lai had launched a weekly series of livestream video events, shown on Facebook and YouTube, in which he addressed the world. (I acted as the moderator.) On the day after he was released following the police raid on the Apple Daily newsroom, he appeared on the livestream, as defiant as ever. More than 200,000 people watched. In subsequent months, his guests would include Chris Patten, Cardinal Joseph Zen, former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, retired
U.S. four-star general Jack Keane, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Ambassador Raymond Burghardt, and former Asian Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Michael Gonzalez. He remained unafraid. “Contrary to what they might think, I don’t hate the Party,” Lai had told the New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan in 2019. “I just don’t fear them.”
If Lai refused to be cowed, he understood that Hong Kong had entered a new era. In an interview in early September, he said that the newspaper would no longer advocate positions—in other words, no longer act as an anti-government political party—but would stick to straight news reporting. He stressed that staff had to worry about their safety. If the pressure got too great, the paper would shut rather than abandon its principles. “The day we cannot operate anymore we will close it down. Compromise is not what we established this company for. We just go on doing what we do, there is no balance.”
For more information on “The Troublemaker,” please visit Simon & Schuster or join us at The Frontline Club in London on the evening of February 6 to hear Mark Clifford and fellow author Ian Williams discuss Jimmy Lai, his impact on Hong Kong, and the absurd injustice of his national security trial.
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