Apple Daily's still dominating the news in Hong Kong

The headlines of the front page of Apple Daily yesterday

(with the photos of its five arrested senior executives in between)

 

The front page of today's Apple Daily
 

The Apple Daily saga continues to run and dominate news headlines (especially in its own newspaper).  Despite missing the quintet of Next Digital's CEO (Cheung Kim-hung) and COO (Royston Chow), the newspaper's chief editor Ryan Law, associate publisher Chan Pui-man and Apple Daily Digital's platform director (Cheung Chi-wai) due to their having been arrested by the national security police on Thursday morning and the freezing of company assets, an edition of Apple Daily did manage to be produced and 500,000 copies of it printed yesterday. 

 

And not only did the staff of Apple Daily respond magnificently to the call of duty once more, so did Hong Kongers --  with many of them queueing from as early as late Thursday evening to buy that whose front page headlines announced that “National security police searched Apple, arrested five people, seized 44 news material hard disks” and, also -- this emblazoned in yellow -- "“we must press on”.  On a personal note: the first two news stands I went to look for a copy of Apple Daily yesterday had sold out earlier in the morning.  At the third new stand that I went to, one man in the line in front of me bought 10 copies of the newspaper, a woman five copies.  And I really did spot a number of neighborhood shops and restaurants offering up free copies of the newspaper to their customers -- today as well as yesterday.  

The stories gleaned from new reports, social media and personal experience about people's support for Apple Daily -- and, by extension, an independent local Hong Kong press -- have been largely heartening.  But there also has been at least one chilling report of a school teacher who bought 10 copies of the newspaper for his colleagues having been reported to his superiors for "bad motives" and subsequently being suspended from teaching for at least one day.

 

In addition, while three of the five senior executives arrested on Thursday morning were released on bail yesterday evening, Apple Daily editor-in-chief, Ryan Law, and Next Digital's chief executive, Cheung Kim-hung, have been charged with "collusion with foreign or external forces".  And although it's not unexpected, it still was sad to get confirmation earlier today that the duo have been denied bail -- with chief magistrate Victor So's rejection of their bail applications carrying the implication that they are guilty as charged since he reasoned that there was insufficient reason for the court to believe that the defendants would not "continue to endanger national security" (my emphasis).

 

Other depressing developments that have come out of Hong Kong's courts in recent days involve: a Hong Kong Museum of History staffer jailed for six months for posting a photo of police officers online during the November 2019 Polytechnic University siege; and a staffer from pro-Beijing newspaper, Ta Kung Pao, being let off the hook for the same offence that RTHK program producer Bao Choy was convicted off in April.  And while five individuals were found guilty of taking part in the mob attacks at Yuen Long on July 21st, 2019, the fact of the matter is that so many more of the attackers have not been prosecuted and remain at large. 

If only the authorities were as relentless in their investigation and prosecution of those mobsters as they are of, say, pro-democracy politicians and activists or newspaper folks.  Back to the latter: It bears emphasizing that Thursday's actions against Apple Daily "was a shock, not only to Apple Daily staffers but to journalists throughout China’s freest city and, more broadly, people concerned about eroding press freedom in the former British colony."

 

For one thing, there is very much the sense that "once Apple Daily has been completely shut down, [the authorities] won't stop there. They'll just move on to the next one down the list."  And while press freedom and freedom of speech are things we consider important and have been harping about -- not least because they are supposedly enshrined in Article 27 of the Basic Law -- it is becoming clearer and clearer that we also have to worry about the loss of freedom of information in Hong Kong.  Because, without the likes of Apple Daily, "Within 1 or 2 years we will be on par with the mainland. No genuinely independent local media & a firewall around the internet including foreign media."