Newspaper’s ‘murder’ marks death of press freedom in Hong Kong

Jul 03, 2021

HONG KONG: Last week Hong Kong saw not only the closure of a newspaper but the death of press freedom. The city’s most popular newspaper and the only remaining Chinese-language, mass circulation pro-democracy daily publication, Apple Daily, published its final edition on June 24. It printed a million copies, and they sold out within hours.

The death of Apple Daily was not because it ran out of money or markets. On the contrary, it had 600,000 paid subscribers and more than US$50 million in the bank — enough to cover another 18 months. It closed because the Hong Kong government froze its bank accounts, making it impossible to pay salaries and bills, after arresting its editor-in-chief Ryan Law and four other senior executives.

Its Catholic founder and proprietor, Jimmy Lai, is already in jail on numerous politically motivated charges and faces a potential life sentence under the city’s draconian national security law. In short, as Mark Simon, former senior executive at Next Digital, Apple Daily’s parent company, put it in an op-ed in the Washington Post on June 26, the newspaper “didn’t just die. It was murdered.” Murdered by the Chinese Communist Party regime that has taken direct control of Hong Kong and is strangling freedom itself.

Apple Daily symbolised Hong Kong’s freedoms. Courageously and constantly publishing stories and opinions critical of the regime in Beijing and its proxy quislings in Hong Kong, the newspaper was fearless in promoting democracy and human rights. As a consequence, the authorities hated it and, over the course of the past year, became determined to kill it. –– ucanews.com