Hong Kong’s shuttered Apple Daily newspaper ran a front-page advertisement in May 2020 that said “freedom has become a crime,” the national security trial against the paper’s founder Jimmy Lai has heard.
Prosecutor Ivan Cheung on Monday presented to the court the front-page from Apple Daily on May 4, 2020, which featured the Chinese characters for “freedom” written in a way that resembled a prison cell. The advertisement contained a line that said “freedom has become a crime, no turning back” in both Chinese and English and was signed by “a group of Hongkongers, on the 101th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement.”
The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist movement that grew from student-led protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919.
Apple Daily also published an illustration, which Cheung alleged Lai had done, of a large red star squashing an old man and a youngster. The image was accompanied by a line that said, “should the rule of law and freedom be torn down, I shall have nothing,” and Lai’s signature.
Former associate publisher Chan Pui-man, who earlier pleaded guilty to conspiring to collude with foreign forces and is testifying against her former boss, told the court that political news reporters at Apple Daily had seen “interesting and creative” works inspired by the original advertisement online, as well as Lai’s take on it. Several of these works were collected and published in a in a soft news section of the paper.
“I think we at that time didn’t treat this as a big news story,” Chan said in Cantonese, on the 28th day of the trial at the West Kowloon Law Courts Building. “I think the report mentioned other people, like some famous cartoonists or key opinion leaders, who were also inspired to create something. Mr Lai was only one of them mentioned in this collective work.”
Asked about the soft news section, in which articles were attributed to a pseudonym, “Lee Ba-fong,” Chan said the pen name had long been used by Apple Daily’s political news desk, and that the section itself often focused on gossip from the city’s political scene.
Chan is one of six senior Apple Daily employees who pleaded guilty to conspiring to collude with foreign forces in November 2022 and will be sentenced after Lai’s trial, which is expected to last 80 days.
Former publisher Cheung Kim-hung and editorial writer Yeung Ching-kee also agreed to testify for the prosecution.
Cheung on Monday also displayed a transcript of a video featuring prominent politician and founder of the city’s largest opposition the Democratic Party, Martin Lee, in which Lee promoted an Apple Daily subscription plan rolled out in July 2020.
“To me, Apple Daily is a way of life. I wake up every morning and read Apple Daily while I am having breakfast,” Lee said, according to the transcript, adding that when Lai launched the paper in 1995, he had wished to establish a “truly independent” and “outspoken” newspaper.
The judges – a panel of three picked by the city’s leader to preside over national security trials – on at least two occasions questioned Cheung’s line of questioning. “I don’t understand. What is the relevance of this?” asked Judge Esther Toh, while Judge Alex Lee also asked about the “evidential value” of Lee’s transcript.
Cheung responded that the prosecution would rely on Lee’s video to build its case “at an appropriate time,” without further elaboration.
Separately, the prosecutor showed Chan an opinion piece titled “Scoundrels are destroying the rule of law in Hong Kong,” published under Lai’s Apple Daily column on May 10, 2020. Cheung also displayed WhatsApp messaging records which suggested that Lai had consulted with Chan about certain word choices in the op-ed and a quotation from Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong.
The quote included was uttered by Patten in 1997 before the city returned to Chinese rule. “My anxiety is this: not that this community’s autonomy would be usurped by [Beijing], but that it could be given away bit by bit by some people in Hong Kong,” Patten said.
Chan said she found the original saying on the internet and sent it to Lai, adding that the media mogul had not discussed the content of the article with her prior to its publication.
Cheung also asked the former publisher about a text message exchange between herself and editorial writer Yeung, in which she sent the latter three political commentators’ pages on Patreon, a platform for content creators.
The political commentators mentioned in the exchange include Canada-based Simon Lau and Taiwan-based Stephen Shiu, both veteran media personalities in the city.
Chan said that Lai was fond of Lau’s articles and was hoping to recruit him as a writer for Apple Daily. She described Lau’s style as “leaning towards the democratic camp” and Shiu’s as “critical of the government.”
The trial continues on Tuesday with Chan’s again taking the witness stand.
Lai has pleaded not guilty to two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the security law and one count of conspiring to publish “seditious” materials under colonial-era legislation.
Lai, 76, faces life in prison if convicted. He has been detained since December 2020, and is currently serving a five-year, nine-month sentence in Stanley Prison, a maximum security facility, for a separate fraud case.
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