In the middle of the night, deep inside an industrial park on the outer fringes of Hong Kong, a group of about 100 men and women sat quietly on the pavement. A row of police officers and a squad of security guards from Nigeria separated the crowd from the small knot of reporters on the scene.
A heavyset man in a white polo shirt told the crowd it was time to stand, and they did — slowly and laboriously, as if rising from a church pew. Then he lifted his bullhorn.
“Jimmy Lai (黎智英) is a running dog,” he said.
“Jimmy Lai is a running dog,” they said.
“Apple Daily’s fall is good for Hong Kong,” he said.
“Apple Daily’s fall is good for Hong Kong,” they said.
“Down with Jimmy Lai,” he said.
“Down with Jimmy Lai,” they said.
The protest in the early hours of Thursday was the fourth in four nights outside the headquarters and printing plant of the Apple Daily, the unabashedly pro-democracy newspaper that is a thorn in the side of the ruling establishment in Hong Kong.
The paper and its outspoken founder, Lai, are reviled by the government in Beijing, but they have been tolerated because of the agreement with Britain that transferred sovereignty over Hong Kong back to China in 1997.
That agreement provides for the preservation of civil liberties in the territory that are unheard of in China. Freedom of the press is one; another is freedom of assembly, which allows the organizers to stage their anti-Apple Daily protests, just as it makes possible the huge pro-democracy demonstrations in the heart of Hong Kong in recent weeks.
On Monday last week, protesters outside the plant blocked delivery trucks from leaving the compound, delaying the distribution of the newspaper and of some copies of another newspaper printed there, the International New York Times.
Times spokeswoman Vicky Taylor said that some subscribers got their editions very late and others on the following day, and that some who complained to the newspaper’s call center were given a one-day extension of their subscriptions. She said the Times was not the target of the demonstrations.
The Apple Daily obtained a court injunction to prevent the protesters from blocking its trucks. Copies of the injunction lay strewn across the pavement early on Thursday morning, near a sign with large Chinese characters reading: “Wicked fatty Lai, you will die without sons.”
However, by 1am, the delivery trucks had already left the plant and 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.
Mark Simon, an executive at Apple Daily’s parent company, Next Media Ltd, said the protests were instigated by the Chinese Communist Party and that their purpose was “the slow bleed” of Hong Kong’s independent press.
“It makes it more difficult in terms of normal business and that is the goal,” 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 the Apple Daily. Last year, two major British banks with extensive business in Hong Kong and China, HSBC Holdings PLC and Standard Chartered PLC, pulled their advertising from all of Next Media’s outlets. The banks said their decisions were based on commercial considerations, but Simon said pressure from the Chinese government’s liaison office in Hong Kong was the reason.
Chinese state media outlets published an article this month suggesting that Lai had made enormous profits by selling Hong Kong shares short before the pro-democracy sit-ins began on Sept. 28. When an online publication in China questioned the logic of the accusatory article, it was shut down for a week, the South China Morning Post reported.
In August, a rival paper posted a fake obituary of Lai, saying he had died of AIDS and cancer.
Lai was born in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in 1948 and arrived in Hong Kong at age 12. He made his fortune as a clothing retailer and through media businesses in Taiwan and Hong Kong. He and the Apple Daily have been outspoken in their support for the territory’s pro-democracy protest movement, called Occupy Central, and he helped finance a referendum organized by the Occupy group in which almost 800,000 ballots were cast. Lai has also been seen with the protesters, who have erected a tent city on a 10-lane boulevard next to the Hong Kong government’s headquarters.
Outside the printing plant early on Thursday, there was a ripple of excitement when a woman in a white T-shirt walked through the small crowd of demonstrators, telling them to “go get some food and drink” at a station that had been set up on the sidewalk. A block away, a line of 70 taxicabs waited to whisk them away.
The protests against Lai continued later on Thursday, when hundreds of demonstrators, at least one accompanied by an Indonesian maid, converged outside Hong Kong’s anticorruption office to denounce him over a political donation he made that has been the subject of an official inquiry. Using an epithet that Chinese communists have flung at their opponents for decades, one of the demonstrators’ posters called Lai a “running dog traitor to China.”
Michael Forsythe is a reporter for the New York Times news service.
Additional reporting by Keith Bradsher
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