When Hong Kong’s High Court sentenced newspaper owner Jimmy Lai (黎智英) to 20 years in prison this week, officials declared that his “heinous crimes” had long poisoned society and that his punishment represented justice restored. In their telling, Lai is the mastermind of Hong Kong’s unrest — the architect of a vast conspiracy that manipulated an otherwise contented population into defiance. They imply that removing him would lead to the return of stability.
It is a politically convenient narrative — and a profoundly false one.
Lai did not radicalize Hong Kong. He belonged to the same generation that fled from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — and later gave voice to the freedoms that had given him everything.
To understand why Beijing’s account collapses under scrutiny, one must begin with Hong Kong’s origins. The city was not built by people seeking opportunity within China; it was built by those who rejected the CCP system. From 1949 through the Cultural Revolution, families crossed the border in waves to escape famine and persecution unleashed by Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) campaigns. They arrived in Hong Kong with the bitter certainty that the CCP’s rule was something to escape, not live under. They rebuilt their lives in a place defined by freedom, law and markets.
This inheritance shaped Hong Kong’s political instincts long before the world heard the name Jimmy Lai. The children of refugees did not grow up hearing praise for the CCP. Instead, they absorbed stories of campaigns, violence, hunger and fear. And in 1997, these families did not greet the return to China with enthusiasm. Many emigrated; those who stayed were determined to preserve what had made Hong Kong unique.
Against this backdrop, the claim that Lai “poisoned” society mistakes effect for cause. Apple Daily (苹果日報) was not the origin of Hong Kong’s culture of dissent; it was the mirror in which that dissent recognized itself.
Lai’s life story embodies the history Beijing now seeks to suppress. As a boy, Lai slipped across the border seeking a better life. He began in a glove factory, rose through the textile industry, and later founded Giordano, one of Asia’s most recognizable retail brands. After the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, he concluded that economic success meant little if political repression could sweep across a nation overnight. He sold his stake in his apparel empire and turned to media.
Apple Daily was his answer. Its success and popularity flowed not from manipulation, but from recognition: Readers saw their own political instincts reflected in its pages.
That is why Beijing must cast Lai as the mastermind of subversion to bury a reality it cannot afford to face: Hong Kong’s defiance is an organic product of history and identity. To admit this would be to acknowledge a fundamental rejection of the CCP’s rule by the people it proudly reclaimed.
International observers often ask if Lai violated the National Security Law. But the law itself is the issue: It is a legal architecture where almost any political expression is construed as subversion. The question then is not whether Lai broke the law, but whether the law was designed to criminalize the identity of the society it governs.
Dissent aside, what Beijing cannot tolerate is the example Hong Kong represents: A Chinese society that prospered under the rule of law, flourished as a British colony and commemorated June 4 every year without interruption since 1989. That refusal to forget stands as a quiet rebuke to the CCP’s monopoly on historical truth. When Lai gave voice to those convictions, he became an ideal target.
Sentencing Lai to what amounts to a life term is therefore more than the punishment of a 78-year-old man. It is the symbolic prosecution of the society that produced him — and of the promises once made to protect it.
Jimmy Lai was never the mastermind of Hong Kong’s resistance. He is the scapegoat required to sustain a fiction — that the people of Hong Kong have nothing against China.
But this narrative demands more than the punishment of one man. If Lai’s 20-year sentence is meant to assign blame, the sentencing of his colleagues is meant to extinguish a profession. The world should remember their names.
Cheung Kim-hung (張劍虹), former chief executive of Apple Daily, received a sentence of six years and nine months. Chan Pui-man (陳沛敏), associate publisher, was sentenced to seven years. Law Wai-kwong (羅偉光) and Lam Man-chung (林敏驄), successive editors-in-chief, each received 10 years. Fung Wai-kong (馮煒光), executive editor-in-chief of English news, was given 10 years. Yeung Ching-kee (楊清奇), editorial writer, received seven years and three months.
With these sentences, Beijing has done more than silence a newspaper — it has ended press freedom in Hong Kong.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong now living in Taiwan.
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