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Apple falls

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If you visited the Mekong Review website this week you might have noticed a minor embellishment to our masthead. The ‘apple on our “i”’ was our modest tribute to Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newspaper. The raucous pro-democracy tabloid was forced to close this past week after Hong Kong authorities froze its bank accounts and arrested several of its executives, editors and a columnist on national security charges. Another editor was arrested on Sunday night at Hong Kong airport as he sought to leave the city.

The paper’s unscheduled closure met with an outpouring of tributes both in Hong Kong and around the world, even prompting a public statement by US President Joe Biden who called the Apple Daily ‘a much-needed bastion of independent journalism in Hong Kong’ and declared the closure ‘a sad day for media freedom in Hong Kong and around the world’.

The forced shut down of the Apple Daily by authorities hardly came as a surprise. Its owner, billionaire Jimmy Lai, has been the regime’s Public Enemy Number One for years, and his paper a thorn in their side since its founding 26 years ago. Beijing was further enraged by Lai’s trips to the US in 2019 and 2020, during which he met with figures such as vice-president Mike Pence and secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and advocated for sanctions.

The closure highlights the parlous state of press freedom in the city in the wake of Beijing’s crackdown following anti-government protest movement of 2019 and the imposition of a National Security Law in July last year. Secretary for Security John Lee—who has just been promoted to the city government’s number two position of Chief Secretary—insisted that the Apple Daily was not engaging in ‘normal reporting activities’, yet refused to identify any of the over 30 articles published in the paper that the police alleged constituted criminal acts of colluding with foreign forces to impose sanctions on China and Hong Kong. Police also warned the public not to share the unspecified articles on social media.

The action of the authorities to freeze the assets of a company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and force it to close down, all without so much as a court order, let alone anyone having been found guilty of any crime, also raises questions about the state of the rule of law in a city that still claims to be an international financial centre.

The Apple Daily closure has not happened in isolation. During the same week, the government launched an investigation into the display of books authored by Lai on the ‘Librarian’s Choice’ shelf of a public library, and the organisers of Hong Kong’s annual book fair announced that they would call in the police if any books exhibited at the fair threatened national security.

Speculation has now turned to which of Hong Kong’s independent media outlets will be targeted next, the assumption being that this is an ongoing campaign by authorities, not a one-off operation. Over the weekend online pro-democracy news outlet Stand News announced that most of its board of directors had resigned, it would cease accepting subscriptions from readers and it had removed all opinion pieces and commentary from its website, out of concern for the safety of its contributors.

The level of public sentiment for the Apple Daily among the Hong Kong public was unmistakable. On its final day, the paper sold-out a print run of 1 million copies, with demand still far outstripping supply. With the closure of the Apple Daily, Hong Kong has lost not just an independent media outlet, it has lost a local institution that has been a part of the cultural landscape for almost three decades, and—for all its faults—held up a mirror to a unique Hong Kong identity. The gap it leaves will be keenly felt.
 

Notebook

Taiwan’s West Berlin moment

Ming-sho Ho

In April last year, having successfully warded off the coronavirus threat, Taiwan launched #TaiwanCanHelp. The campaign donated face masks, protective clothing and other medical equipment to countries where the pandemic was swiftly spreading.

A little over a year later, Taiwan was unexpectedly confronted with an outbreak of its own. Paradoxically, its previous success (under 1,200 confirmed cases out of a population of 23 million) had become a liability, with people making the calculation that the risks of infection were lower than those of side effects from vaccination. As such, when the crisis exploded in May of this year, the majority of Taiwanese were left unprotected, and the island found itself facing a vaccine shortage. To make matters worse, the government’s attempts to purchase vaccines produced by Germany-based BioNTech was repeatedly frustrated because PRC-based drug company Fosun Pharma claimed to have exclusive rights to distribute the vaccine in Greater China, including Taiwan. At the same time, pro-China politicians in Taiwan took advantage of the crisis to agitate for the authorised use of the Chinese Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, sowing further public vaccine scepticism and distrust.

Read more here

Watch it:

For more on Apple Daily, the pro-democracy online outlet Stand News produced an excellent short film on the paper’s final days featuring interviews with the staff. Watch it here.

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