Taipei/Taiwan – The Hong Kong government has frozen the tabloid’s pro-democracy assets, causing it to shut down in summer 2021.
Mark Simon, founder assistant and mastermind of Apple Daily, talked about the struggles the newspaper and its employees went through during a time when the Hong Kong government clamped down on publication, and about the details of the large police raid on the newspaper’s newsroom, and the arrest of its owner Jimmy Lai.
Chan, a Hong Kong student residing in Taipei, expressed resentment towards the closure of “the only printing newspaper willing to report on the truth”, considering its closure as a restriction of media freedoms.
“No matter living in Taiwan or Hong Kong, I will keep on reading Apple Daily. And since Hong Kong’s Apple Daily was completely shut, I feel relieved that there is still an Apple Daily in Taiwan. I think it represents a spirit that never gives up, a courageous spirit that pursues the truth. It is very good that such a legacy lives on in Taiwan,” he said.
Apple Daily founder Simon claimed that authorities in Hong Kong seeks to silence the paper for the reasons of knocking out the biggest free press group in town and the heart of Apple Daily Jimmy Lai.
“Mister Lai got arrested in 2020, we started seeing the first raid in our newsroom, 400 police officers, and one of the things that were wonderful is that we kept right online, right ongoing, largely thanks to the female journalists, because the cops made a mistake, they showed up without enough women cops, so our female journalists went into the bathrooms and went to other places and were literally working away and some of them just sat into their desks and kept typing, “arrest me!” that’s what they said, “just arrest me, I don’t care!” in another word, there was a defiance there that was all inspiring,” he added.
Journalist Tsang Chi-ho said “Before the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment protests in Hong Kong, people there, especially officials, would even mention the nuisance of ‘fake news. But since the protests, officials would often mention the term ‘fake news. And they would often say ‘why is Hong Kong becoming so violent?’, ‘why are there so many people protesting?’. They all blamed ‘fake news’ which manipulated people, and claimed that they misled people.”