Opinion: China cancelled Apple Daily — and Hong Kong’s freedom

Beijing has savagely murdered a media outlet whose crime was to stand up for democracy and human rights.

China’s brutal Communist Party has managed to close the last independent news voice in Hong Kong, The Apple newspaper, killing the last remnant of pro-democracy free speech in the former British colony.

Owner Jimmy Lai is in gaol, so are his senior executives, both editorial and managerial, who were rounded up by national security police at their homes and offices.

If you think this is irrelevant or you’re too woke to care you’ve got your head in the sand.

It will be exactly a year next Wednesday that the full text of Hong Kong’s ruthless national security law was released after being enacted.

Its 38th article gives the national security law (NSL) boundless reach. The text states that the NSL, in addition to covering anyone in Hong Kong, regardless of nationality or residency status, also applies to offenses committed against Hong Kong “from outside the Region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the Region.”

This is intimidation on steroids. Even the Nazis or the Soviet Communist Party didn’t hide behind a trumped up fiction of a law when they persecuted their enemies – they just hunted them down and assassinated them.

One million copies of The Apple’s last edition were sold to a readership reeling at this latest example of Beijing’s savagery toward any sign of dissent but anxious to have a souvenir that symbolized their lost freedom.

An Apple Daily journalist holds freshly-printed copies of the newspaper's last edition. Picture: AFP

Norman Choy, who worked at the paper for all but four years of its 26-year existence, said the paper owed its popularity to its connection with its readers and reflected their hopes for democracy and human rights and opposition to Beijing’s crushing chokehold on the city.

“Hong Kong lost Apple Daily because Hong Kong has lost its voice,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

“The government had to shut us down because it doesn’t want to hear these voices anymore.”

“The era of free political speech as we have long known it is gone,” said Sharron Fast, a journalism lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, who cited the censorship of books, art and movies in the city.

“The loss of Apple at this point almost feels like we are at the brink of collapse. And it is natural for this loss to be profoundly felt in the city.”

Mr Lai started the Apple Daily newspaper in 1995 to defend the Hong Kong way of life before the 1997 handover to China. Its inaugural launch editorial declared: “We are convinced that Hongkongers who are accustomed to freedom will not stay silent in the face of unreasonable restrictions and unfair treatments, for Hongkongers are born with a passion for freedom.” Apple Daily journalists pledged to “stick to our posts and work hard, to be proud Hongkongers through and through.”

The last copy of the Apple Daily will be a souvenir that symbolises Hong Kong’s lost freedom.

We should care because a direct line can be drawn from the totalitarian actions of Beijing to the horde behind cancel culture in Australia. Last week, a mob of irrational protesters forced the former deputy prime minister and former National Party leader Mark Vaile to reject his appointment as Chancellor of the University of Newcastle because he was also chairman of Whitehaven Coal, a major employer in the region which also hosts the largest coal exporting port in the world. In fact, Newcastle’s mining sector provides one of the bulwarks of the Australian economy, one of the strengths that have enabled the nation to survive the global Covid pandemic in better-than-expected shape.

Mr Vaile’s appointment made perfect sense but not to the senseless baying pack who are happy to have their education underwritten by the miners’ taxes and hope to see even more taxpayers’ money spent on subsidies for inefficient so-called renewable energy sources like solar and wind which rely on high-energy input manufacturing.

Instead of targeting Mr Vaile and attacking the industry that created their city and built their university, rational members of that community would be seeking to erect statues of the miners who have sustained Australia over the past century since the gold rushes. Our universities, deservedly, are on the nose. Whether it is James Cook University’s shameful attack on the whistle-blowing marine physicist Peter Ridd, former Sydney Vice Chancellor Michael Spence’s failure to protect free speech or Melbourne University’s failure to examine the false claims of author Bruce Pascoe, the academy has failed our nation.