The Assault on Apple Daily

A newspaper’s demise shows how far China will go to bring Hong Kong into line

- Iain Marlow

Journalists tend not to be early risers. So when some 500 police officers arrived at the offices of Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy newspaper, at 7:30 a.m. on June 17, feature writer Shirley Leung was still asleep in her apartment. She finally checked her phone around 9 o’clock. The messages coming in were alarming. The police had detained the paper’s top editors and were sweeping its newsroom, carting away files and hard drives, a scene that would have been hard to imagine in Hong Kong even a few years earlier.

It seemed wise to stay away from the building, so Leung didn’t come in until 2 p.m. Her desk, close to where some of the arrested editors sat, was a mess; officers had ripped out her computer, leaving only the monitor behind. Leung was glad that, like many journalists at Apple Daily, she’d stopped keeping confidential documents or sources’ details on her office system. But she had little time to think about the implications of what had just happened: She and her colleagues still had a paper to put out. She borrowed a computer and got to work.

Leung had joined Apple Daily in 2018. After working for a string of more conservative publications, she felt lucky to be at the bold, if somewhat sensationalist paper. Owned by Jimmy Lai, one of Hong Kong’s most idiosyncratic tycoons,