Beijing is aggressively wielding the axe to cut down the Apple Daily, the last “apple tree” in Hong Kong’s media industry that can still bear the fruit of press freedom. The main branch of the tree, Taiwan’s Apple Daily, has already announced its suspension, and Hong Kong’s Apple Daily, as its home, is naturally not spared. In mid-April, the Communist Party’s Hong Kong media, Ta Kung Pao, announced that the Hong Kong government would legally ban the Apple Daily in order to close a loophole in national security. Anyone familiar with the CCP’s methods of killing dissidents already knew that the fate of Hong Kong’s fragrant apple tree was inevitable.
A few days ago, Mr. Lai Chi-ying, the founder of the Apple Daily, wrote to his colleagues in prison: “The situation in Hong Kong is becoming more and more chilling, which is why we need to love and cherish ourselves. The times are both falling before us, and it is even more time for us to stand with our heads held high. Please take care of your colleagues.” This letter shows that he was fully prepared for the situation and his own martyrdom. “The times have both fallen before us” is a sentiment I believe many people now share after the world storm of 2020.
Xi Jinping’s approach to disobedient media is different from the Mao era and even Deng Xiaoping’s post-June 4 shutdown approach, which was more of a “jam the stomachs of dissenters” approach. This approach has evolved with the times, and is a softer form of killing than Mao’s hard beheading approach. After all, using political violence to shut down the media will cause “friendly countries to be surprised” and the media industry to express their pity, while using economic sanctions can achieve the same effect of power shutdown, but also to silence the onlookers; to the world’s countries, both explicitly and implicitly, to share a piece of China’s foreign propaganda in English and other languages of the media to serve as an example to others It will also serve as an example to the English and other written media around the world, which have been taking a share of China’s foreign propaganda pie.
It is said that after Mao Zedong became king, he never touched money again. Later, in the international community, because China was so poor, it was mainly ideological forces that made the left in the West follow Mao, the world revolutionary leader, except for tightening their belts to help their socialist brothers in Africa and Albania. However, since 2003, when the Chinese Communist Party theorist and three-time founder Zheng Bijian declared the “peaceful rise of China,” the Communist Party has had money in its hands, especially large foreign exchange reserves, and has begun to spend a lot of money abroad and buy influence globally.
In the process of buying influence, Beijing will naturally apply the same “economicization of political issues” that Jiang Zemin pioneered at home since the 1990s to foreign countries. The media in Taiwan and Hong Kong (including the Chinese media in the United States and other countries) are subjected to the “no food for the insubordinate” approach: those who obey will be fed advertisements (or implanted advertisements such as soft text praise articles) and explicit or implicit sponsorship; those who do not obey will be banned from placing advertisements by Chinese capital and Chinese businessmen by the diplomatic or resident agencies of the Communist Party. The detailed circumstances of these approaches are discussed in detail in my book Red Infiltration: The Truth about the Global Expansion of Chinese Media (published by Taiwan’s Eight Flags Culture Press in 2019). At the time, because the information at hand was mainly limited to Chinese and English-language media directly purchased by the CCP, it did not cover some of the major English-language media that have worldwide influence. The financial cooperation between these media and the CCP has been exposed since last year, and the media (people) involved have openly admitted this connection, which shows that it has become commonplace for media in various countries to be bought.
This is what Li Zhiying said in his letter: “The times are falling before us.” Anyone who is willing to open his eyes to the facts and face such a reality will inevitably feel sad, helpless and desperate.
This time, the Chinese Communist Party cut down the apple tree, using a two-pronged approach to cut off the financial resources of the Apple Daily. Anyone who has run a media business knows that a market-oriented media depends on circulation and advertising costs to survive. In the Internet era, there are fewer and fewer media outlets that rely solely on circulation, and advertising has become almost the only way to survive. Taiwan’s Apple Daily continues to operate at a loss because of the decreasing number of advertisements, which of course cannot exclude the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party is behind the operation. On May 14, the Hong Kong government issued a press release stating that the Secretary for Security had issued a written notice to freeze the shares of Next Media Limited held by Lai Chi-ying and the assets of three companies owned by him in local bank accounts, in accordance with Schedule 3 of the Hong Kong SAR Government Security Law Implementation Rules. -This is what the Chinese Communist government has been doing for more than 70 years on the mainland: no food for the disobedient, jamming the stomachs of those who disagree, and making people bow to the power of the strong because of the crisis of survival.
Hong Kong’s media industry has long since fallen, with only the Apple Daily left struggling to hold on. In the article “Hong Kong loses its soul if it loses its tolerance”, the author said that during the British Hong Kong era, Hong Kong was able to become an important financial center in Asia, attracting people from many countries to settle and do business because of its strong cultural tolerance. The introduction of the Hong Kong version of the National Security Law in 2020 is tantamount to announcing to the world that Hong Kong’s inclusiveness is a thing of the past.
The apple tree, which Lai Chi-ying has planted for decades, has become a place where the media industry in Hong Kong is overgrown with bad grass, and the remaining apples on the tree are particularly irritating to the Chinese Communist authorities, who want to cut it down before they do so. Although the apple tree is scarred, and it can be expected that the Chinese Communist Party will continue to cut it down in the online world, history will remember this section: the day the apple tree is cut down is the day the freedom of press in Hong Kong dies.
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