China Silences Hong Kong’s Biggest Pro-Democracy Newspaper

A s the Chinese Communist Party upended Hong Kong’s political freedoms with a repressive national-security law last year, international businesses largely stayed put, and the city maintained its reputation as a global financial hub. But the imminent demise of its most prominent pro-democracy newspaper should convince executives to reconsider.

Mark Simon, a top adviser to Apple Daily owner Jimmy Lai, confirmed in an interview with National Review this afternoon that the newspaper’s operations in Hong Kong would likely cease by the end of the week, with its fate likely to be sealed tomorrow. The city’s secretary of security has frozen the paper’s funds, meaning it can no longer pay its approximately 1,000 employees, many of whom could face prosecution for their work.

That much is all but settled and was widely reported today, first by Reuters. But Simon also has a chilling message for bankers who still believe in the city’s reputation as a financial hub. “Now they’re using physical force to take a publicly listed company out. They have no boundaries,” he says. “Protect your shareholders and protect your clients. Don’t pretend that Hong Kong is an international financial center anymore. It’s not.”

The likely shuttering of Apple Daily is just the latest salvo in the Chinese Communist Party’s wildly successful campaign of political repression in Hong Kong, which accompanied enactment of the national-security law eleven months ago. Western governments have protested and implemented pinprick sanctions, but they’ve been unable to force an end to the crackdown, which has swept up dissidents such as Lai and Joshua Wong, forced protesters off the streets, and prompted others to flee.

In April, Lai was sentenced to 14 months in prison. Last week, his paper’s offices were raided by 500 police officers for the second time in a year, and five of its top editors, including Editor-in-Chief Ryan Law, were arrested. Hong Kong officials claim that the arrested staff members were not conducting “lawful journalistic work.” They also claim that Apple Daily is welcome to appeal the freezing of its assets, eliding the reality that even if an appeal were successful — which it almost certainly wouldn’t be — it would not play out in time to save the paper.

Hong Kong authorities’ decision to snuff out Apple Daily will have consequences for the city’s viability as an international banking center, according to Simon. In the past, it was Apple Daily that would break major stories alerting investors to fraudulent business activity, so much so that the paper has faced numerous lawsuits from peeved executives. Its reporters also unearthed malfeasance by municipal officials, plans to prevent holders of a special British passport from accessing mandatory pension funds, and the refusal of Chinese banks to grant staff time off during the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

Apple Daily’s willingness to shed light on the machinations of a corrupt bureaucracy in cahoots with Beijing — and the businesses that enable it — has long made the paper a target. Simon’s and Lai’s bank accounts were similarly frozen by court order in early 2000, but back then, they were able to successfully appeal the decision. This time around, the appeals process isn’t a viable option.

So Apple Daily will fold, with its final edition expected to run by the end of this week. Its employees will be left facing a serious threat of arrest, and those of them who want to flee the city are likely to have the option of seeking asylum in the United States, where Department of Homeland Security officials have signaled a willingness to take them in. Meanwhile, the effects will ripple across Hong Kong’s media environment. Simon predicts that other news outlets — smaller websites given political cover by the continued existence of Lai’s paper in the city — will be the next to fall as the authorities continue to tighten their grip.

The impotence of the world’s democracies looms large in all of this. The United States has led the world with tough statements, sanctions targeting specific officials, and the elimination of special provisions in U.S. law that treated Hong Kong as separate from the mainland. Thus far, however, the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has declined to make use of a key provision in the Hong Kong Autonomy Act that authorizes the imposition of sanctions on banks complicit in the crackdown.

Simon offers an explanation: “The finance community keeps coming in and keeps saying, ‘You’ll hurt the people of Hong Kong.’” He also says that nominally American institutions such as Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and JP Morgan ought to be viewed as international firms no different from HSBC and Mitsubishi Bank. “We’ve reached a point where we cannot consider this an international financial center. And I have no qualms whatsoever, as an American citizen, violating the Chinese national-security law — saying the Hong Kong Autonomy Act is there [and] we need to use it.”

Among the final pieces published by Apple Daily’s English-language vertical is an editorial about the complicity of public intellectuals in assaults on human freedom throughout history. “Whether it was the Cultural Revolution in China, or Nazi Germany, there were dark times in the history of human civilization. Yet, dawn is bound to come after darkness, and humans will return to civilization,” the piece concludes. And maybe that’s true. But after more than 25 years as a welcome source of light, Jimmy Lai’s paper is going dark for good, and no dawn will save it.