And I’m feeling a sick pit in my stomach. Fear not for us but for the families of the Apple Daily staff and those in other local media. We had little to do with the Apple Daily. Twenty years ago we ran some ads for our new Wall Street Institute business in it. And at one stage I wanted to write a letter to its Editor, but found they had no Letters to the Editor page. Nor an op-Ed page. It was pure trash tabloid, of sex drugs and Canto-pop They were major ambulance chasers: gruesome in-the-scene photos of car crashes, splashed across the front pages. At least that was the content whenever I did pick up a copy. With that formula they did very well financially (as Rupert Murdoch has shown!). They should have stuck to that instead of going all political in 2019. But they didn’t. And when I dipped into the Daily from time to time over the years just to get a feel for what’s being read by locals, I came across articles bemoaning the “tightening control” of Beijing, a trend not obvious to me.
So it’s not that the closure of Apple Daily affects me or us personally. It doesn’t. But it’s a loss to our city. A very popular paper, gone, and mourned. It will be missed. And it will surely scare others into line. If they don’t, they may suffer the fate of Daily Owner Jimmy Lai and ten of his staff. Jimmy in jail, his staff arrested.
Jimmy Lai’s “crime” was not just to support the 2019 riots, it was to go to Taiwan and call for involvement of third parties (aka America) for the purposes of “liberating” Hong Kong. Calling for other courier to sanction China. That was a very silly thing to do — and we thought so at the time — but surely not deserving of the rest of his life in jail. Is it relevant here — or just a case of moral equivalence, of whataboutism — that Spain, an exquisitely democratic member of the EU, jailed nine people who had called for Catelonian independence? They let some out yesterday which is what reminded me. China could quote that as mitigation. Then again, Madrid is saying they can “talk” to the secessionists. No way Beijing is going to “talk” to Jimmy Lai. They are not such gentil españols. They’re not out to “mitigate” what they take to be a necessary and lawful act.
Jimmy Lai’s arrest and that of his staff is all being done at the direct behest of Beijing. It’s pretty certain he would have personally infuriated Xi Jinping with his antics. Our C-E, Carrie Lam, meantime, stands by, with an almost-but-not-quite embarrassed look on her face.
I’m wondering what happens if Hong Kong gets to my own Red Line: Firewalling the Internet. If I can’t post in this blog, or freely read blogs and Google stuff. Will I have to up sticks and move? That would be a huge wrench as it remains — still — very cosy here for a comfortable old white guy. We have friends who live by choice on the mainland. And we’ve lived there ourselves. Still… Hong Kong is different. And the mainland different enough that we don’t want live there. I prefer here to anywhere else, at the mo. I’ll wait and see.
The other worrying news is that the fellow charged with secession, for running a motorbike into a group of police back in 2019, while carrying a “Free Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times” flag, is going to have a trial in front of three judges. No jury trial. This is unprecedented and a break from Common Law. Thing is, apologists for Beijing and of the crackdowns here in Hong Kong, have assured me all along that there’s “no way” Beijing would mess with Hong Kong’s Common Law system as they wanted to keep studying it and valued it for international trade. Well: way.
ADDED:
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| Top Left: “Apple Daily” Banner. Whiteboard: “Quality is our promise” Bottom: Jimmy Lai escorted to prions; empty AD offices This is my photo of the inside spread of today’s South China Morning Post |
So far, our daily, the South China Morning Post is keeping up credibly independent coverage. They’ve avoided the ire of Beijing, perhaps, because they didn’t out-and-out call for independence, as did the AD, or for foreign governments to sanction China, again, as the AD, or at least owner Jimmy Lai did (in Taiwan!). Not to excuse Beijing here, just that these people did know they were dealing with tyrants. That’s what they called them, after all:”tyrants”. Well, tyrants are gonna do what tyrants do. No surprise there. And this is not hindsight. Many of us were warning of this way back. Keep the freedoms we have, we urged. Those freedoms are precious and what many countries would die for. But no. They challenged the tyrant in the name of freedom and democracy and in doing so damaged both.
ADDED AGAIN: The Hong Kong stock market is up today and recent housing release have been sold out at record levels. Financially at least, no one seems much to mind about the Apple Daily. Its print run today was a million copies, three times normal and all sold out. Hong Kong people have a thing for collectibles…
