Apple Daily: Hong Kong opposition newspaper 'fights on' after founder arrested

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper has vowed to “fight on” after the arrest of owner Jimmy Lai under the new national security law.

Copies of Tuesday’s edition of the newspaper flew off the shelves as Hong Kong citizens queued from the early hours to read about the most high-profile arrest yet made since the introduction of the controversial legislation.

The tabloid printed more than five times the number of papers as usual, putting out 550,000 copies in anticipation of public interest in the arrest, which was deemed a breach of press freedom in an editorial statement published in Tuesday’s edition decrying the previous day’s events.

Around 200 police officers descended on the Apple Daily newsroom early on Monday, arresting Lai and several other executives of his Next Media company, which owns the tabloid.

Events were livestreamed for more than six hours by the newspaper online. Besides making the arrests, police were seen cordoning off sections of the newsroom, rifling through documents and questioning staff members.

Lai was taken in on suspicion of foreign collusion, though it was not immediately clear what he stood accused of. Chinese communist party officials had called Mr Lai a “traitor” for travelling to the US for a meeting at the White House with the vice president, Mike Pence, and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, said he was “deeply troubled” by the arrest of the media mogul, claiming it to be “further proof that the [Chinese Communist Party] has eviscerated Hong Kong’s freedoms and eroded the rights of its people”.

The US stepped up its opposition to the new national security law on Friday, imposing sanctions on leader Carrie Lam and 10 other officials accused of undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy.

The US has not been alone in opposition to Beijing's creeping authority over the region, on Sunday the foreign ministries of the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand co-signed a letter condemning the "unjust disqualification of candidates" from Hong Kong's legislative council elections.

Beijing has responded sharply to criticism of Monday’s arrests. When Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) deemed the arrests a “direct assault on press freedom”, they were met with a swift response from China’s foreign ministry calling on them to “stop smearing under the pretext of press freedom the implementation of the National Security Law”.

Apple Daily was founded by Jimmy Lai back in 1995, during the period when Hong Kong was preparing for the transfer of rule from Britain to China. Lai is revered by many in the troubled region for his direct criticism of China’s authoritarian leadership.