In City of Protests,Pro-Democracy Newspaper Becomes Target
Demonstrators gathered outside the printing plant of Next Media, publisher of the Apple Daily newspaper, in Hong Kong late Wednesday.
LAM YIK FEI / BLOOMBERG NEWS, VIA GETTY IMAGES
By MICHAEL FORSYTHE
OCTOBER 16, 2014
About 100 people, men and women, young and old, sat quietly on the pavement in the early hours of Thursday morning, deep inside an industrial park built on landfill on the outer fringes of Hong Kong.
Slowly, laboriously, they stood up, as if rising from a church pew, after being directed by a heavyset man in a white polo shirt who was carrying a bullhorn. He faced the small crowd of reporters gathered there; a row of Hong Kong police officers and a squad of security guards from Nigeria separated them. He lifted his bullhorn:
Man in white polo shirt: “Jimmy Lai is a running dog!”
Chorus: “Jimmy Lai is a running dog!”
Man: “Apple Daily’s fall is good for Hong Kong!”
The anti-Lai protests continued later in the day, as hundreds of demonstrators, at least one accompanied by an Indonesian maid, converged outside Hong Kong’s anticorruption office to denounce Mr. Lai over a political donation he made that sparked an inquiry. One poster called Mr. Lai a “running dog traitor to China.”
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting.
Slowly, laboriously, they stood up, as if rising from a church pew, after being directed by a heavyset man in a white polo shirt who was carrying a bullhorn. He faced the small crowd of reporters gathered there; a row of Hong Kong police officers and a squad of security guards from Nigeria separated them. He lifted his bullhorn:
Man in white polo shirt: “Jimmy Lai is a running dog!”
Chorus: “Jimmy Lai is a running dog!”
Man: “Apple Daily’s fall is good for Hong Kong!”
Chorus: “Apple Daily’s fall is good for Hong Kong!”
Man: “Down with Jimmy Lai!”
Chorus: “Down with Jimmy Lai!”
It was the fourth night in a row that protesters had gathered outside the headquarters — and printing plant — of Apple Daily, the unabashedly pro-democracy newspaper that is a thorn in the side of the ruling establishment in Hong Kong. It’s also reviled by the central government in Beijing, which must tolerate its existence and the political activism of its outspoken founder, Jimmy Lai, because Hong Kong, as part an agreement that transferred sovereignty over it to China from Britain in 1997, has civil liberties unheard of on the mainland, including freedom of the press.
The city also has freedom of assembly, and the organizers of the anti-Apple Daily protests, coinciding with the huge pro-democracy sit-in demonstrations in the heart of the city, took advantage of that to stage their protests. On the first night, Sunday, they blocked Apple Daily’s delivery trucks from leaving the compound, delaying distribution of the newspaper, as well as of The International New York Times, which is also printed at the facility, by hours.
Apple Daily then obtained a court injunction to prevent the protesters from blocking its trucks. On Thursday morning, pages of the injunction lay strewn across the pavement, in front of a sign with large Chinese characters that read: “Wicked Fatty Lai You Will Die Without Sons.”
But by 1 a.m. Thursday, the delivery trucks had already left and the newspapers were on their way to newsstands. The protesters who were demonstrating on a side street away from Apple Daily’s gates presented a bigger obstacle to Hitachi, whose elevator division has a facility next door.
A spokeswoman for The New York Times did not reply to a request for comment in time for publication.
Mark Simon, an executive at Apple Daily’s parent company, Next Media Limited, said that the point of these protests, which he says originate with China’s Communist Party, is “the slow bleed’ of the independent press in Hong Kong.
“It makes us more attractive as a place for journalists, it makes it more difficult in terms of normal business, and that’s the goal,” Mr. Simon said in a telephone interview. “The goal is to make us outcasts. The goal is to drive people away.’’
State-owned Chinese companies do not advertise in Apple Daily, and last year HSBC and Standard Chartered, two major British banks, pulled their advertising across the whole spectrum of Next Media’s platforms. Mr. Simon said this was because of pressure from the Chinese government’s liaison office in Hong Kong. The banks said their decision was based on commercial considerations.
This month, a mainland online publication was shut down for a week after it posted a story that questioned the logic of an article about the founder of Apple Daily. The article, which appeared in Chinese state media, suggested that Mr. Lai had made enormous profits by selling Hong Kong shares short ahead of the Sept. 28 start of the sit-in protests, The South China Morning Post, another local newspaper, reported. And in August, a rival newspaper posted afake obituary of Mr. Lai, saying he had died of AIDS and cancer.
Born in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in 1948, Mr. Lai arrived in Hong Kong at age 12 and made his fortune as a clothing retailer and in media in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He and Apple Daily have been outspoken in their support for the protest movement, called Occupy Central, which was planned more than a year ago when organizers threatened to stage sit-ins in Hong Kong’s Central financial district if China’s legislature did not allow voters genuine choice in 2017 elections. In June, Mr. Lai helped pay for a referendum sponsored by the Occupy Central group in which more than 700,000 ballots were cast.
Mr. Lai has also been seen spending time among the protesters, who have erected a tent city on a 10-lane boulevard next to Hong Kong’s government headquarters.
Early Thursday, a ripple of excitement passed through the demonstrators. A woman in a white T-shirt walked through the crowd, telling them to “go get some food and drink” at a station that had been set up on the sidewalk. A block away, 70 taxi cabs lined up along the length of the road waited to whisk them away.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting.
