A Defiant Stand for Freedom

Hong Kong’s struggle against tyranny, and why it matters

By Claudia Rosett

The last time a despotic power devastated Hong Kong was during World War II. 

On December 8, 1941, Imperial Japanese troops poured over the hills from China, overwhelmed the main line of British colonial defenses, and took up positions on the Kowloon peninsula, across the harbor from Hong Kong Island. 

From there, they shelled and bombed the island, then crossed the harbor and on Christmas Day completed a subjugation of the city that lasted until 1945, when Japan lost the war and Britain retook control.
Today, the tyranny ravaging Hong Kong is that of its own sovereign master, the People’s Republic of China. 

The tactics are less broadly lethal but brutal nonetheless, targeting the freedoms vital to the soul of this vibrant city. 

China is trying to grind down Hong Kong’s democracy movement, while preserving global-facing amenities like the airport and the banking system. 

It’s a campaign fought with propaganda, surveillance, arrests, and a local police force turned against Hong Kong’s own people. 

Beijing has threatened Hong Kong with “the abyss” and cautioned that “those who play with fire will perish by it.” 

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping warned in October, clearly aiming at Hong Kong’s protesters, that any attempt to divide China would end in “crushed bodies and shattered bones.”
Contrary to China’s claims, the Hong Kong crisis is not an internal matter. 

It is a violation of China’s treaty promise, after Britain’s 1997 handover of its former colony, that Hong Kong would be governed as an autonomous territory, entitled to all its accustomed rights and freedoms, for at least 50 years—a promise that China dubbed “one country, two systems.” 

It is also a warning to the world of how Beijing views frees societies and what Xi’s “China Dream” of global dominance has in store for them. 

Hong Kong is the only enclave under China’s flag with any freedom to speak out. 

At great risk, Hong Kong’s people have sounded alarms about the methods and ambitions of China’s ruling Communist Party. 

Americans needs to understand why, in this twenty-first-century contest of values, Hong Kong’s fight is our fight, too.
Hong Kong exemplifies the marvels of freedom. 

Built with free trade and minimal government, a haven in British colonial days for refugees fleeing Communist China, it is a mighty entrepôt conjured out of little more than a rocky island, a magnificent harbor, and generations of freewheeling human enterprise.
Until this year, Hong Kong figured on the world scene chiefly as a great place to do business. 

Home to 7.5 million people, with a large expatriate community, including more than 80,000 Americans, the city has long served as a crossroads of Asia and the main conduit for China’s financial dealings with world markets. 

Via Hong Kong, foreign investors in China could rely on the legacy of British law, vastly preferable to the vagaries of China’s Communist Party-driven system. 

China, in turn, could avail itself of Hong Kong’s banking system and trade, leveraging to its own benefit the privileges accorded to a territory operating as part of the free world, though under China’s flag.
At the time of the 1997 handover, many worried that China would plunder Hong Kong outright, killing the golden goose. 

But for more than two decades, no grand crisis materialized. 

Yes, Beijing was leaching away Hong Kong’s freedoms, reneging on the promise of free elections, overwhelming the city’s culture with mainland visitors— and threatening, disenfranchising, and, in some cases, jailing its most active pro-democracy figures. 

And yes, Hong Kong’s people pushed back, staging many demonstrations, some quite large—notably the 2014 Umbrella Movement’s 79-day occupation of Hong Kong’s Central business district. (Umbrellas became the symbol of the protests after they were used as protection from pepper spray.) But these protests were peaceful. 

The world yawned. 

Business carried on.
Then, in 2019, Hong Kong became a battleground. 

As it turned out, China had greatly underestimated the value Hong Kong’s people attached not solely to prosperity, but to freedom. 

In June, Hong Kong’s Beijing-installed Chief Executive Carrie Lam—a longtime Hong Kong civil servant with the political instincts of Marie Antoinette—tried to rush through Hong Kong’s rubberstamp Legislative Council (Legco) a law that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, breaching the protection afforded by Hong Kong’s separate and independent legal system. Faced with local objections that this would spell the end of whatever liberty and justice Hong Kong still enjoyed under the eroding promise of “one country, two systems,” Lam refused to reconsider.
Hong Kong erupted in the most massive protests the city had ever seen. 

It was heroic, given the risks; and heartbreaking, given the prospects. 

On June 9, a record 1 million people marched through the streets, mass protest being their only recourse in a system rigged by Beijing to deprive them of a direct say in their own government. 

Lam shrugged it off. 

Three days later, protesters physically blocked lawmakers from entering the legislature to pass the bill. 

Police responded with teargas, beatings, and arrests. 

When Lam then suspended passage of the bill but refused to withdraw it entirely, denouncing the protesters as rioters, an estimated 2 million people marched—more than one-quarter of the city’s population. 

Lam gave them nothing. 

This focused public attention on Lam herself, and the perils and injustice of a political setup that left Hong Kong’s people no way to choose or depose their own chief executive. 

In short order, Hong Kongers came up with an amplified list of demands, including universal suffrage.
A signal moment came on July 1, the anniversary of the 1997 handover, when protesters broke down doors and windows of the legislature, briefly occupied the main chamber, spray-painted black Hong Kong’s Beijing-imposed emblem of a Bauhinia flower, proclaimed a list of demands for justice and democracy, and graffitied a message in Chinese on the nearby premises: “It was you who taught me that peaceful protests are useless.”
A complex culture of protest rapidly developed, incorporating the lessons of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. 

Some brought their young children to huge, peaceful rallies and marches. 

Civil servants, bankers, teachers, and students participated in city-wide strikes and impromptu demonstrations. 

Old and young linked hands to form human chains for miles, calling for freedom and democracy and chanting the Cantonese slang phrase ga yau, meaning “add oil”—a call to keep going. 

Protesters came up with a haunting anthem, “Glory to Hong Kong,” and began singing it at sports matches, in shopping malls, and while they marched in protest through the streets.

Because leaders of the Umbrella Movement had gone to prison, the protesters of 2019 avoided anointing leaders. 

Crowdsourcing tactics online, under a slogan plucked from a Bruce Lee movie, “Be water,” they staged flash protests around the city. 

They developed a uniform of sorts and an order of battle. 

The “frontliners” wore helmets, goggles, gas masks, and black t-shirts, and wielded as weapons an ad hoc arsenal that escalated from umbrellas, laser pointers, and bricks to Molotov cocktails, slingshots, and flaming arrows. 

Support protesters, including volunteer medical teams and bucket brigades, resupplied the frontlines with everything from bottled water to first aid supplies. 

Across the city, donations rolled in to support the protests: money, food, drink, and protest gear. When police launched a dragnet in August, setting up subway and ferry checkpoints, anonymous Hong Kongers got in their cars and whisked protesters to safety in an impromptu vehicular operation they dubbed “Dunkirk.”
Instead of trying to defuse the protests with talks and compromise, Lam defaulted to the methods of a police state, dispatching Hong Kong’s cops to wield force. 

Hong Kong’s police, once regarded as among the finest in Asia, were transformed into shock troops for China, trying to beat, gas, and terrorize the democracy movement into submission. 

Police began referring to protesters as “cockroaches.” 

Stories circulated that ranks of local cops had been beefed up with members of China’s People’s Armed Police, overheard speaking mainland Mandarin rather than Hong Kong’s Cantonese dialect.

By early December, police had fired more than 15,000 rounds of tear gas, blitzing not only streets across much of the city but also subway stations, residential buildings, shopping malls, and universities. 

They pepper-sprayed pro-democracy lawmakers who were trying to reason with them, shot three protesters with live ammunition, drenched not only protesters but a Kowloon mosque with caustic blue dye from water cannons, and carried out more than 6,000 arrests. 

The protesters escalated their tactics to smashing the windows of pro-Beijing businesses and setting fire to subway entrances and street barricades. 

The police were caught on video beating and kicking trussed-up protesters and launching unprovoked attacks on bystanders and journalists. 

In November, an attempted police raid on Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University turned into a flaming battle, followed by a 12-day police siege from which some protesters escaped by abseiling from a pedestrian walkway or traversing the sewers.
Through it all, Lam remained cloistered in official surroundings, issuing periodic statements that there could be no serious dialogue until “calm and order” was restored. 

Never mind that it was precisely the lack of any genuine government dialogue or compromise that was driving the escalating havoc.
One of the most potent protests came in mid-summer, when thousands of protesters occupied the city’s airport, in a bid to force the government’s hand on a world stage, and in a venue where the police might surely hesitate to respond harshly. 

Hong Kong’s airport is one of the world’s busiest. 

Travelers transiting the outer halls of the huge building found themselves surrounded by Hong Kongers holding up signs in English and Chinese denouncing the encroaching tyranny of China. Protesters packed the arrival hall, their chant echoing through the vast atrium: “Fight for Freedom! Stand with Hong Kong!”
Near the departure desks, beneath an official sign welcoming visitors to “Asia’s World City,” protesters hung a huge banner, flanked by American flags, saying “President Trump Please Liberate Hong Kong.” 

They papered the walls, windows, and baggage carts with signs blasting police brutality and demanding justice. 

On the information desks, they replaced the brochures for shopping, dining, and Disneyland with pamphlets calling for democracy, apologizing to visitors for the inconvenience. 

One young man, wearing the protesters’ trademark black t-shirt and face mask, roamed the halls with a hand-lettered sign offering to explain the situation to baffled travelers: “Feel free to ask me, I do speak English!”
Hong Kong’s government, forced briefly to shut down the airport, finally ended the inconvenience with threats, riot police, pepper spray, arrests, and greatly constricted access. 

Large security cordons now control entry to the building, admitting only those with tickets and passports. 

Teams of security agents patrol the premises. 

Public transport to the airport is now closely monitored and sometimes greatly curtailed, to thwart any crowds heading that way.
This lockdown did nothing to address the protesters’ demands for liberty and justice, but for official purposes it fixed the problem at the airport. 

The government’s solution for the airport appears to be the template for the future. 

In Beijing’s scheme of calm and order, Hong Kong is not a polity of, by, and for the people; it is merely a large asset of China’s government. 

As such, it is the profitable utilities, not the people themselves, that the government would protect, under the cloying slogan: “Treasure Hong Kong: Our Home.”
I’ve loved Hong Kong since I first beheld it, during a family stopover decades ago. 

I lived and worked there from 1986 to 1993, as editorial-page editor of what was then the print edition of the Asian Wall Street Journal. 

With Hong Kong’s glorious sweep of hills and harbor, its kaleidoscopic street life, its savvy mix of Chinese and Western traditions, and the constant hum of commerce, it felt like the most invigorating city on the planet. 

You could fly out of Hong Kong to report on the region’s tyrannies, observing the strictures and enduring the minders of, say, China, Vietnam, or North Korea. 

Then you could return to Hong Kong, with its can-do culture and laissez-faire ways—and exhale. 

In the summer of 1989, returning to Hong Kong after reporting in Beijing on the June 4 Tiananmen massacre, I was speechless with relief. 

Hong Kong residents were staging huge protests against the repression in China. 

I was back in the free world.
That’s not how it feels today. 

In September, Lam finally announced that she would withdraw the despised extradition bill. 

But by then, her administration was importing some of the cruelties of China’s system wholesale.

During many weeks of reporting there since June, I found an atmosphere of defiance edged with fear; a city of people in face masks, keeping a wary eye out for advancing cordons of riot police. 

Under pressure from China, companies such as Hong Kong’s flagship airline, Cathay Pacific, carried out purges of personnel who had in any way shown sympathy with the protesters, an intimidation described locally as “white terror.” 

Hong Kongers, when they take their leave these days, are less likely to say “goodbye” than to warn, “take care.”
How did it come to this? 

The answer tracks back to the era of Queen Victoria, Britain’s Opium Wars, and unintended consequences, good and bad, played out over almost two centuries. 

The British did not set out to develop Hong Kong into a world-class metropolis of millions; they simply wanted a trading post, for the noxious purpose of selling opium into China. 

So they went to war to get it. 

In the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, China ceded to Britain in perpetuity the island of Hong Kong, a name which in Cantonese means “Fragrant Harbor.” 

At the time, it was home to a fishing village, a war prize famously ridiculed by Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, as “a barren island with hardly a house upon it.”

The British turned it into a Crown Colony, named its harbor for their queen, and set up shop. 

They fought a second Opium War, and in 1860, China ceded the tip of the Kowloon peninsula, also in perpetuity. 

In 1898 Britain signed a 99-year lease with China for some adjacent turf, called the New Territories, stretching up to the hills that form a natural boundary with mainland China. 

That produced the full map of what we know as modern Hong Kong.
Out of this, about a half century later, came one of the great economic miracles of modern Asia. 

Hong Kong at the end of World War II was a shattered city with a population of less than 600,000. 

In 1949, Mao Zedong imposed his Communist revolution on China. 

Millions fled to Hong Kong, embracing its culture of enterprise and providing labor and talent that under British liberty and law created soaring wealth.
Not that the British permitted genuine democracy in Hong Kong; governors appointed in London ruled the colony. 

But behind that setup were the checks and balances of British democracy, to which the governors were ultimately accountable. 

Hong Kong’s people, post-World War II, had freedom of speech and assembly, and an independent judiciary based on British rule of law.
Hong Kong was a colony richly primed for democracy and independence, in an era when the British empire was breaking up and decolonization was sweeping the globe. 

The United Nations, founded at the end of World War II, compiled a list of colonies slated for eventual self-determination. 

Initially, Hong Kong was on it. 

But in the early 1970s, China swiped away that right. 

In 1971, during Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China, Beijing’s Communist government took over the UN seat for China, held until then by the rival Nationalist government on Taiwan. 

China immediately joined the UN committee on decolonization. 

Within weeks, the committee removed Hong Kong from its list of colonies, on grounds that its fate was China’s affair. 

That was the end of any UN support for Hong Kong choosing its own future.
When China informed the British that there would be no renewal of the lease on the New Territories, due to expire in 1997, London had no appetite for a showdown over Hong Kong—considered indefensible without the New Territories, and dependent on China for its water supply. 

In 1984, Britain and China signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, scheduling the handover for July 1, 1997. 

This treaty, deposited with the United Nations, stipulated that for 50 years following the handover, Hong Kong would be governed as a Special Administrative Region, enjoying a “high degree of autonomy,” with its people retaining their “Rights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of travel”—and a host of others.
Thus did Hong Kong become the world’s only free society with a distinct shelf date. 

For Britain—handing over a substantially free population to a tyranny—the grace period allowed a face-saving retreat, bolstered by the bequest of a mini-constitution, or “Basic Law” for Hong Kong, hammered out with Beijing before the handover, in which China agreed to the “ultimate aim” of allowing Hong Kong’s people to elect their own chief executive and entire legislature via universal suffrage. 

Conveniently for Beijing, no date was spelled out for this goal.
For China, then miserably self-impoverished by decades of Communist central planning, acquiring Hong Kong was a colossal windfall. 

As a bonus, it carried the implied message that the world’s great democracies, under pressure from Beijing, would not defend their own.
If the promised half century of grace for Hong Kong sounded like a long time back in 1997, it doesn’t anymore. 

Officially, the clock has ticked down to 28 years remaining. 

In practice, if China has its way, the deadline will arrive much sooner. 

Meantime, a generation born in Hong Kong around the time of the handover has come of age. 

Many are descended from parents or grandparents who fled Communist repression in China. 

They describe themselves not as Chinese but as Hong Kongers. 

They are the vanguard of Hong Kong’s protests, and many say they are prepared to die for freedom.
This passion did not appear out of thin air. 

Nor is it a product—as China’s propaganda has charged—of foreign influence organized by sinister “black hands.” 

Hong Kong’s protesters today are heirs to a homegrown democracy movement that dates to British colonial days. 

It was fostered decades ago by leaders such as barrister and former lawmaker Martin Lee, who in 1997 greeted the handover with the defiant declaration: “The flame of democracy has been ignited and is burning in the hearts of our people. It will not be extinguished.” 

Then there’s self-made businessman Jimmy Lai, publisher since 1995 of Hong Kong’s widely circulated pro-democracy Chinese newspaper, Apple Daily, who told me in an interview this August: 

“We can’t give up. If we give up, we will have to endure the darkness of dictatorship.” 

Lee, now in his eighties, and Lai, now in his seventies, both marched at the front of some of this year’s protests.

Down the generations, this movement is packed with brave and articulate figures, including pro-democracy lawmakers whom police during the past six months of protest have tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and drenched with water cannon. 

Some of the youngest democracy advocates, such as Joshua Wong and Nathan Law, both in their mid-twenties, have served time in prison for their leadership of the 2014 Umbrella movement—and emerged to continue arguing the case for Hong Kong’s rights.
Hong Kong’s passion for democracy was on rich display in elections on November 24 to seats on the city’s district councils. 

These are relatively powerless positions, dealing with local matters such as bus routes and trash collection. 

But they’re the only elections in Hong Kong that entail a genuinely democratic process. 

Hong Kongers turned out in record numbers to send a message at the polls, delivering a landslide for pro-democracy candidates, who won control of 17 of the 18 district councils.
These are valiant achievements against fearful odds. 

Hong Kong’s freedom movement is up against the regime of Xi Jinping, who, since he became president in 2013, has been ratcheting up repression across China, styling himself as the modern Mao. 

Under the label of perfecting “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the 66-year-old Xi has been establishing himself as president for life of a techno-authoritarian state. 

China’s system now includes a program of “social credit,” meant to engineer human behavior to please the party, and reeducation camps to brainwash Uyghur Muslims. 

Hong Kong’s protesters harbor well-grounded fears that Xi might have similar plans in store for them. 

“If this movement dies, we’ll be living in the Orwellian society that is coming,” says one Hong Kong academic.
Xi has thrown visible support for years behind Lam. 

In 2019, after Lam triggered the huge protests and then further enraged the public with her refusal to concede to any demands or corral the police, she was caught on a recording, leaked to Reuters, lamenting that she could no longer go to shopping malls or a hair salon for fear of “black-masked young people waiting for me.” 

A month later, she incited yet more public fury by invoking despotic emergency powers to ban face masks. 

The following month, Xi summoned her to an audience in Shanghai; Chinese state media reported that he still firmly supported her. 

By then, casualties in Hong Kong were extensive, rubble lined many of the streets, and Hong Kong’s economy had tipped into recession.
Should Americans care? 

Especially since the end of the Cold War, America has spent blood and treasure trying to foster free societies around the globe, on the reasonable theory that this tends toward a safer, more prosperous world. 

It’s a tall order. 

But in Hong Kong, with no grand programs of foreign aid and consultancies, and under the shadow these past 22 years of Chinese sovereignty, a free society has materialized, and its people are calling for us to stand with them against tyranny. 

If we do nothing but watch while China swallows Hong Kong whole, Beijing will learn the relevant lesson.
The endgame here is desperately uncertain. 

Neither America nor any other nation is likely to go to war in defense of Hong Kong. 

An armed conflict, even if meant to defend the city, would likely destroy it. 

But America can enforce its new Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which President Trump signed into law last month, and which requires annual reports on whether China is respecting Hong Kong’s rights under “one country two systems”—and imposes penalties if China is not. 

We can expose the lies with which China tries to discredit Hong Kong’s democracy movement. 

We can sound the alarm generally on China’s maneuvers to undermine the democratic world, and we can build up the U.S. military both to counter directly China’s military rise and to give America’s leaders a stronger hand in dealing with Beijing. 

We could offer asylum to as many of Hong Kong’s people as America can absorb. 

Not least, we can look with respect and gratitude on a people who prize freedom so highly that, while they call for us to stand with them, they themselves, outnumbered and certainly outgunned, are facing down China’s tyranny on the frontlines, in the streets of their own city.

Hong Kong Protesters Call for U.S. Help.

The United States, viewed as a champion of democracy, occupies a symbolic role in the protests. Activists now want President Trump to take a tougher stand against Beijing.
By Edward Wong

Protesters rallying last month in Hong Kong.

HONG KONG — The Hong Kong protests at times seem like love fests with the United States. Depending on the day, demonstrators wave American flags or Uncle Sam recruitment posters, and even dress as Captain America, complete with shield.
The United States represents democracy, and the activists hope that maybe, just maybe, it will save Hong Kong. 

Five months in, they are trying harder than ever to draw the United States into their movement.
The protesters are pressing Hong Kong officials and their overseers, the authoritarian Communist Party leaders of China, for greater democratic rights and rule-of-law in the autonomous territory. 

As they see it, the Trump administration might be able to make demands of Chinese leaders or Hong Kong officials, especially because members of elite political circles want to maintain access to the United States.
Also, they note, the trade war with China, started by President Trump, is adding pressure over all on Xi Jinping.
For the American government, the protests are more complicated — a potential policy dilemma but also a potential point of leverage with Beijing and a way to channel American values to the rest of the world.
“The United States should continue to deter Beijing from use of force, maintain an unblinking eye on Hong Kong, and make Beijing pay a heavy reputational cost for curtailing the rights and freedoms of Hong Kong citizens,” said Ryan Hass, a former State Department and National Security Council official now at the Brookings Institution.
Yet, he added, “I worry that the protesters in Hong Kong risk misinterpreting American sympathy and support of their cause for expectation that the United States will shield them from Beijing’s heavy hand.”
Hong Kong protesters see the United States as a potential savior in their quest for greater democratic rights.

If the protesters are sending out a siren song, some American officials and lawmakers are answering it, eager to show their commitment to the cause.
Members of Congress have appeared in Hong Kong in public displays of solidarity. 

Last month, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, donned an all-black outfit, while Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, posted photographs from a protest.
In Washington, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, has met with activists, pro-democracy politicians and Jimmy Lai, a publisher considered radioactive by Beijing. 

Vice President Mike Pence singled out Hong Kong as a beacon of liberty in a speech, saying, “We stand with you; we are inspired by you.”
And versions of a bill that would give support to the protesters are moving though Congress with bipartisan backing. 

The legislation, among other things, would allow the United States to impose economic sanctions and a travel ban on Hong Kong officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses.
“We hope this bill will pass,” said Selina Po, a 27-year-old protester wearing a mouth mask in the Admiralty neighborhood as she held up a sign with the bill’s name, the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. 

“It’s our hope for winning this war. We’re trying all we can.”

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, with Hong Kong activists at a news conference in September.

Greater involvement by Americans could give Beijing more ammunition in its propaganda effort to portray the pro-democracy movement as one stoked by foreign forces.
The Chinese government and state-run news organizations talk about “black hands” behind the unrest and spread conspiracy theories, including one centered on an American diplomat in Hong Kong who was photographed with activists in the lobby of the JW Marriott Hotel.
As the protests persist, American officials are watching for surges in violence and tracking the movement of People’s Liberation Army soldiers into Hong Kong. 

Some are beseeching demonstrators to stick to nonviolent tactics, even in the face of police crackdowns and attacks by people sympathetic to Beijing.
On Sunday, at least six people were injured when a man with a knife who is believed to be against the democracy movement attacked a family at a shopping mall. 

In the melee, the attacker bit off part of the ear of a pro-democracy district council member, Andrew Chiu.

Two Democratic Congressmen, Tom Suozzi of New York and John Lewis of Georgia, the icon of the American civil rights movement, posted a video last month praising the activists for their “great work” and urging them to stick to nonviolence.
Whether the United States takes greater action on Hong Kong hinges on the unpredictable Trump. 

Administration officials and American lawmakers talk openly about checking the authoritarian impulses of the Chinese Communist Party. 

But Trump rarely, if ever, mentions human rights and democracy, and he has not made strong statements on Hong Kong.

In June, he told Xi Jinping on a call that he would stay quiet on Hong Kong as long as Washington and Beijing were making progress on trade talks, according to an American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In October, the Trump administration imposed some restrictions on Chinese companies and organizations for their roles in the mass repression of Muslims in mainland China, but Trump has held back from harsher actions for fear of upsetting the trade negotiations.
If a Hong Kong bill reaches Trump’s desk, analysts say, he might see it as merely a tool to wring concessions from China and could forego support if a trade agreement were close.
“Strong American bipartisan support for the peaceful protesters is not enough to override Trump’s transactional instincts,” Mr. Hass said. 

“He does not look at Hong Kong through a values-based lens. And as long as he remains president, this outlook will limit America’s responses to developments in Hong Kong.”
Administration officials argue that Trump’s approach gives the United States a stronger hand in constraining Beijing on Hong Kong — even if it appears that Trump just wants to use the Chinese territory to his advantage.
“America expects Beijing to honor its commitments,” Mr. Pence said, “and President Trump has repeatedly made it clear it would be much harder for us to make a trade deal if the authorities resort to the use of violence against protesters in Hong Kong.”
In the eyes of Beijing, there has been no shortage of "provocations" by American politicians. 

On Oct. 22, Ms. Pelosi posted on Twitter a photograph of herself on Capitol Hill with three pro-democracy figures — Mr. Lai, Martin Lee and Janet Pang.
“My full support and admiration goes to those who have taken to the streets week after week in nonviolent protest to fight for democracy and the rule of law in #HongKong,” she wrote.


Nancy Pelosi
✔@SpeakerPelosi
So pleased to welcome Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee and Janet Pang to the U.S. Capitol. My full support and admiration goes to those who have taken to the streets week after week in non-violent protest to fight for democracy and the rule of law in #HongKong.

12.2K
12:04 AM - Oct 23, 2019

On Wednesday, Ms Pelosi slammed the decision by Hong Kong officials to bar the activist Joshua Wong from running in local elections. 

She said it was “another blow against rule of law in Hong Kong and the principle of ‘one country, two systems,’” referring to the foundation for the policy of autonomy that Britain and China agreed would be used to govern the territory.
Ms. Pelosi met Mr. Wong in Washington in September.

Many demonstrators want American intervention and are focusing their attention on the legislation. The mere threat of American sanctions, they say, would give the movement greater voice with Beijing.
On Oct. 14, the night before a vote on the bill in the House of Representatives, protesters held a rally in the Central district to call for its passage. 

Tens of thousands attended, many of them carrying American flags.

American flags have become commonplace at the protests. 

“The power of Hong Kong people alone is limited, and we need other countries, such as the U.S., to help us counter China and keep ‘one country, two systems,’” said Eric Kwan, 32. 

“I doubt the act can be an ultimate game-changer, but I think it is enough to give pressure to China.”
Along with allowing for sanctions, the legislation requires the State Department to review each year whether Hong Kong is still autonomous enough to qualify for the benefits of the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act, which grants the city a trade and economic status different from that of mainland China.
Some American officials say the bill could harm Hong Kong residents if the United States determines that the territory no longer qualifies as an autonomous entity. 

But the bill’s proponents defend its practical and symbolic value.
“Standing in support of Hong Kongers and preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy should be a priority of the United States and democracies worldwide,” said one of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida.
The bill passed the House by unanimous vote last month. 

Though the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has not scheduled a vote yet, the measure is expected to pass that chamber easily, with a veto-proof majority. 

Then Trump would have to decide whether to sign it into law.

How Hong Kongers Show Which Businesses Are Friend or Foe

Hongkongers are adopting small-scale actions to keep the protest movement from stalling, among them a rating system for business for or against the uprising.
By Brendon Hong

HONG KONG—Yellow shop, blue shop, red shop, black shop?
That isn’t the first line in a modern nursery rhyme. 

Rather, it outlines an act of resistance that the people of Hong Kong participate in every day.
Recognizing that the path to true self-governance is one that will take years, if not longer, Hongkongers are adopting small-scale actions so that the protest movement does not stall. 

Medical professionals have daily strikes during daylight hours. 

In the evenings, people meet at certain public squares or in shopping mall atriums so they have a constant, regular presence. 

At night, some yell out protest slogans through their apartment windows.
Street-level actions don’t have the seven-figure turnout like months ago, and are often more scattered throughout the city. 

There’s worry that Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, will invoke emergency powers and cancel the upcoming district elections, where pro-democracy candidates are expected to grab many new seats. 

So, Hongkongers have shifted tactics, and are, for now, voting with their wallets.
For the past few weeks, lists of businesses have been circulating in Hong Kong, each name carrying a color code that defines the stance of its proprietors and general outlook regarding the ongoing protests that have evolved into a movement to shake off the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the city’s affairs.
Shops and brands that are “yellow”—the color of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014—are mostly local, and each in its own way supports those who wear black clothing, gas masks, and hard hats every weekend to translate city-wide discontent into street-level action. 

“Blue” businesses are those where you might find the staff wearing “I (heart) the police” T-shirts, as well as outspoken supporters of the establishment and Carrie Lam.
“Red” shops are affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, while “black” shops—not to be confused with protester-black—are CCP fronts or belong to the Party through direct ownership or shell companies.
The lists serve as guidelines for consumption. 

Hongkongers are encouraged to spend their dollars at businesses like independent bookshops and certain eateries that are marked “yellow.” 

Restaurants that are “blue” have seen steep drops in footfalls in many districts because of the boycott. Starbucks is a chain that is often smashed up during large marches, because it is managed by local conglomerate Maxim’s Caterers; in September, Annie Wu, the daughter of Maxim’s founder, spoke before the United Nations Human Rights Council along with other tycoons, utilizing talking points from CCP propaganda to condemn the blackshirt protesters in her city.

Overtly Chinese businesses see the harshest attacks. 

A branch of Tong Ren Tang, a 350-year-old traditional Chinese medicine maker that was founded in Beijing, was set on fire on Sunday night. 

Throughout the month, Bank of China and China Construction Bank branches saw their ATMs torched in several neighborhoods in the city; some of these banks’ locations are now encased in steel walls to prevent protesters from forcing their way in.
The attacks on “blue,” “red,” and “black” locations have lasted for weeks in Hong Kong, and they remind us of scenes from when the blackshirts briefly seized the legislative building in July. 

There is chaos, but also discipline: No stealing, especially cash. 

Looting is forbidden.
In fact, after the fire set at a store opened by Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone and consumer electronics company, was put out on Sunday night, one man who was found to be scavenging for new phones was apprehended and tied up by protesters, and then left on the street with a handwritten cardboard sign that read “thief.”
On some days, especially over the weekends, there’s a heavy dose of vigilantism on the streets in Hong Kong, yet support from the public remains high. 

A mid-October poll conducted by the Center for Communication and Public Opinion Survey at the Chinese University of Hong Kong indicates that more than 70 percent of people in the city believe that it is acceptable for protestors to use some level of force in the current conditions.
The yellow-blue dichotomy was originally meant to be a boycott campaign, and it quickly gained traction. (The “red” and “black” tags were added later.) 

After Chief Executive Carrie Lam invoked emergency powers to implement a ban on masks, fewer people have been willing to hit the streets for marches than in the summer (though many still wear face masks during their commutes and regular, daily situations to signal their dissatisfaction). Boycotts of “blue” businesses were designed to be a mode of daily participation in the larger blackshirt movement, so that people would be mindful of channeling their disposable income toward proprietors who keep the welfare of the city in mind.
This act may be small, but it’s a constant reminder that the Chinese Communist Party’s greatest weapon in Hong Kong is one that is commercial, wielded by its tycoon proxies and shell companies that are swallowing up swathes of industries.
In mid-September, local pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily ran a report that Lam had met with more than 30 senior managers of Chinese state-owned enterprises, discussing the possibility of these companies taking more control of various business sectors in Hong Kong. 

Lam denied that was the case, saying the meeting was routine.
And yet the CCP has a history of using businesses to distort public discourse in Hong Kong. 

The most explicit example is the Party’s progress in monopolizing the city’s media and publishing industries. 

The CCP owns two newspapers in the city, Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao. 

The English-language broadsheet with the highest circulation in the city, the South China Morning Post, was bought in 2016 by Alibaba, which has become an e-commerce juggernaut with the blessing of Beijing. 

And as of four years ago, the Party’s liaison office in Hong Kong—its political representative in the city—enjoys around an 80 percent market share in book publishing, printing, distribution, and retail.
For individuals who refuse to compromise their principles, things can escalate quickly. 

In 2014, the once-liberal newspaper Ming Pao saw its chief editor nearly hacked to death by men armed with cleavers. 

It was widely believed that the assault was political motivated. 

On more than one occasion, the house of Apple Daily owner Jimmy Lai was firebombed.
Will the boycott of non-“yellow” businesses work? 

Likely not—at least not if the goal is to remove Chinese capital from the port city. 

Hong Kong and mainland China’s economies are inseparable. 

Look hard enough at any set of books, and you’ll likely find a Chinese supplier, customer, or even investor that is linked to the business. 

For now, those details are overlooked by many protesters. 

The blackshirt movement’s color-coded resistance is keeping the broader population engaged, asserting an acutely anti-CCP message in everyone’s minds at all times. 

In those terms, it has been extremely effective.

What keeps the months-long, massive Hong Kong protests going? "60 Minutes" reports

"When you lose freedom, you lose everything," a successful Hong Kong businessman says, explaining why he is part of the pro-democracy street protests
By Holly Williams

This weekend, as they have each weekend for the past four months, pro-democracy protesters took to the streets of Hong Kong, with a message meant to reverberate all the way to Beijing. 

CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams, on assignment for "60 Minutes," has been inside the crowds where hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have joined these demonstrations.
Hong Kong is famous for its freewheeling capitalism. 

After 150 years as a British colony, the city returned to Chinese control in 1997. 

China promised Hong Kong partial autonomy for 50 years -- with an independent legal system, and freedom of speech guaranteed. 

But the Chinese government is now chipping away at those limited freedoms, so Hongkongers are demanding full democracy: the right to elect their own leaders, without interference from Beijing. Jimmy Lai speaks with Holly Williams while protesting in Hong Kong

Who are the protesters? 

And what are their chances of success?
To find out we went to Hong Kong, but to understand what's going on there, you have to start here in Beijing on October 1. 

They threw a carefully choreographed birthday party for the Chinese regime. 

It's been 70 years since the communists took power. 

The show of strength and stability by a rising superpower was also a warning to Hong Kong.
1,200 miles south, people were in no mood to celebrate. 

Hong Kongers are demanding unfettered democracy for their city of 7 million people. 

Many wear face masks to hide their identity from the police.
On the 70th anniversary, the march started peacefully as they normally do.
Holly Williams: You're right in the front.
Jimmy Lai: Yes, always.
At 71, Jimmy Lai has lived the Hong Kong dream. 

Born in mainland China, he fled the communists when he was 12 years old. 

He went from rags to riches, from a worker in a textile factory to a billionaire with a chain of fashion stores. 

And then this.
In 1989, when Chinese tanks massacred students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, he got involved in politics, starting a media company in Hong Kong that isn't afraid to criticize the Chinese government.
Jimmy Lai: I like to participate in delivering information. Because I think information is freedom.
He told us Hong Kongers are demanding real democracy and are fighting to hold on to their basic human rights.
Jimmy Lai: The intention of the Chinese government taking away our freedom is so obvious that we know, if we don't fight, we will lose everything.
Holly Williams: What do you mean lose everything?
Jimmy Lai: When you lose the freedom, you lose everything. What do you have?
Holly Williams: I mean, you have a wonderful city. Prosperity.
Jimmy Lai: That's what Chinese think. That -- they think that we just have a body, we don't have a soul. "You guys just make money, have a good life. Don't think about politics. Don't think about freedom. Don't think about human right. Don't think about rule of law. Just -- just eat. Enjoy life."
Holly Williams: Why is that not enough?
Jimmy Lai: Because we -- we are human being. We have soul. We are not a dog.
And not willing to accept increasing interference from Beijing.
At the anniversary celebration, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping predicted a brighter future for Hong Kong -- but Hongkongers don't trust him.
This gentleman marched proudly with an American flag.
Holly Williams: This man is a refugee from mainland China. He says he swam here in 1962 and he hates the Chinese communist party.
Many of the protesters carry umbrellas. 

That started five years ago in previous demonstrations when they used umbrellas to protect themselves against pepper spray. 

Now the protesters even have their own anthem.
They've released this orchestral version. May freedom reign, go the lyrics. Glory be to thee, Hong Kong.
Jimmy Lai: We share the same value as you Americans. What we are fighting for is the first battle of the new cold war.
Holly Williams: The cold war between the U.S. and China.
Jimmy Lai: -- And China.
Holly Williams: And you're saying your values here in Hong Kong line up with the West?
Jimmy Lai: Yes, because of our -- our British past. They did not give us democracy. But they gave us the rule of law, the free market, the private property right, free press.
Holly Williams: And they have none of those in mainland China?
Jimmy Lai: No. They have none of those.Jimmy Lai

For Jimmy Lai, those values don't come cheap. 

The Chinese government has pressured companies not to advertise in his paper, he told us, costing him millions of dollars a year. 

That's why few business people here dare to criticize China's rulers.
Jimmy Lai: I take the responsibility to fight because this give me -- a meaning to my life.
This young woman, barely in her twenties, calls herself Paris. 

She dresses this way when she protests to protect her identity.
Paris: The people of Hong Kong have been subject to citywide terrorism.
For four months she's been on the front lines.
Paris: The risk I'm taking is pretty much ten years in jail on rioting charges, you know, maybe even more.
Holly Williams: Why are you willing to risk your future for these protests?
Paris: If Hong Kong doesn't have a future, then like, what is my future here? I can't see Hong Kong having a future you know if the movement fails.
Holly Williams: Are you and other protesters willing to risk death?
Paris: No. I'm not willing to die, but you know, I accept that it's a possibility. I think Hong Kong is at a point where things can't turn back, things can only escalate from here.

Paris

The protesters say the police keep overreacting, beating them when they're already down. 

When this group set upon police with metal rods, an officer shot one in the chest at point blank range. He survived, becoming one of more than a thousand protesters to be treated in hospitals. 

2000 have been arrested.
Paris: I think it's difficult when all we have are umbrellas, and police have many weapons at their disposal.
Holly Williams: You don't only have umbrellas. We saw protesters who were throwing petrol bombs. And we've seen—
Paris: Yeah, Molotov cocktails. I would say that the police have pushed us into doing this.
We watched protesters empty a suitcase full of molotov cocktails and set fire to a subway station. The Beijing government uses scenes like this to paint the protesters as rioters, paid off by foreign agents.
The protesters say they won't leave the streets until their demands are met, but the Hong Kong authorities don't want to give in. This is a stalemate and it's only the Chinese government in Beijing that can break it.
China has quietly doubled the size of its Hong Kong garrison in recent weeks. This video seems to be a thinly veiled threat about what Chinese troops might do.

Bernard Chan is a Hong Kong delegate to China's rubber-stamp legislature.
Holly Williams: For 30 years, the West has condemned China for the way that it handled the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. How do you think the world will view Beijing's response to these protests in 30 years' time?
Bernard Chan: I certainly believe that they do not want to see another repeat of what happened back in 1989. So I think that's why they still very much want Hong Kong police to handle our own problem.

The spark for these protests was a proposed law that could have seen people arrested in Hong Kong sent to mainland China, where Hong Kongers don't think they'd get a fair trial. 

Last month, the Hong Kong government finally withdrew the bill, by then though the protesters' demands had expanded to include full democracy.
Samson Yuen: This protest is all about politics. It's about values. It's about civic freedom.
Professor Samson Yuen is studying the protesters. 

His researchers have interviewed more than 13,000 of them. 

He told us most of them are young, middle class, and highly educated. With no official leaders, they organize through online forums.
Samson Yuen: People come up with tactical ideas on how to escalate a protest. How to be innovative. And people actually put this into action.
Holly Williams: Can you give me an example of that?
Samson Yuen: People come up with the idea of protesting at the airport. That idea get a lot of support so it turned into a real action.
Jimmy Lai, the dissident media mogul, says his relatives in mainland China have been threatened with arrest, unless he tempers his criticism. 

He refuses.
Jimmy Lai: I decide long time ago I'm not gonna be intimidated by fear. I say, "No. To hell with it." I'm not gonna think about consequences what I do. I just do what's right.
Lai says his home is under constant surveillance, an apparent attempt to frighten away visitors.

This week, China pressured people outside of Hong Kong; Apple took down an app that could help protesters evade police. Google dropped a game about the Hong Kong protests; and an NBA team executive apologized after tweeting support for the demonstrators.
But on the street, the government's intimidation tactics have backfired, according to professor Samson Yuen.
Samson Yuen: More people are joining the fights because of repeated police brutalities.
Holly Williams: Even the peaceful protesters think that perhaps violence is necessary.
Samson Yuen: Yes. I think definitely. It is not indiscriminate violence. It's more targeted at the police authorities or the government authorities. I think right now, the government is still trying to repress the protests and not willing to negotiate with the protesters.
The young protesters are idealistic, and perhaps naïve, but Jimmy Lai says they're Hong Kong's last chance for freedom.
Jimmy Lai: When I saw the kids went in the front and confront the police, I was very touched. I admire them.
Holly Williams: Why does it touch you?
Jimmy Lai: Because they risk their life to protect this place we call home.
Lai told us his generation has failed them.
Jimmy Lai: In the 30 years, we haven't done anything, the older generation, to secure the freedom, the way of life for our kids. And that's why now they have to stand up to fight for themselves.

Freedom Fighter

Why Jimmy Lai is the only Hong Kong multi-millionaire standing up to China

By Jenni Marsh

Jimmy Lai met with US Vice President Mike Pence in July 2019.

Hong Kong --  Jimmy Lai has been a public target for decades.
It all started after the Hong Kong business tycoon — a refugee from China — reinvented himself in the mid-1990s as the founder of the city's provocative, anti-Beijing tabloid, Apple Daily.
One of the advertisements that introduced the newspaper to the world made Lai's point in the bluntest of ways: By showing Lai sitting in a dark warehouse with a red apple on his scalp, being pelted with incoming arrows fired by a shadowy figure.
Since then, Lai's role as one of Hong Kong's most prominent rabble-rousers has threatened his fortune, subjected him to death threats and made him a symbol of the city's tensions with communist China.
When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, the city was guaranteed its own legal system and certain democratic freedoms until 2047, when it will likely return in total to Beijing. 

Over the past three months, millions have flooded Hong Kong's highways in marches against Beijing's aggressive encroachment on those treasured freedoms.
Apple Daily has become the city's biggest official champion of that movement. 

The newspaper of the protesters. 

Its front pages rally citizens to go out and march, it has given away posters to raise at demonstrations, and it regularly taunts the government for its failures.
In a town of tycoons, Lai is the only multi-millionaire who is prepared to openly jeopardize his fortune for Hong Kong's freedom. 

The 70-year-old is frequently seen at the marches, in the pouring rain or blazing summer heat.
To his supporters, Lai is a brave democracy fighter. 

But his detractors say that Lai and his muckraking publication are a black hand for the United States and cause chaos. 

In recent years, firebombs have been lobbed at his gated home, an obituary claiming he died from AIDS has run in a rival publication and Lai's political donations have subjected him to an anti-corruption case. 

Lai denied wrongdoing, and the case against him was ultimately dropped.
That Lai has ties with the United States is undeniable. 

Last month, he flew to Washington to discuss with US Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton how fundamental Hong Kong's freedom is to the US' standoff with China.
"The new Cold War is actually a rivalry of competing values," Lai says, framing the current US-China trade war as a standoff of between democracy and authoritarianism. 

"We in Hong Kong are fighting for the shared values of the US against China. We are fighting their war in the enemy camp."
It's a battle Lai says he's prepared to die for.

Chinese refugee
Lai had already led an extraordinary life by the time he founded Next Digital group, which owns Apple Daily, in the 1980s.
As the Great Chinese Famine gripped mainland China in 1960, Lai smuggled himself out of the southern mainland province of Guangdong and into Hong Kong in the bottom of a fishing boat. 

He arrived in the city at the age of 12 and dirt poor.
Lai says he became an odd jobs guy at a textile factory, making 60 Hong Kong dollars ($7) a month and living in an apartment with 10 others in the slum neighborhood of Sham Shui Po -- still one of Hong Kong's most impoverished districts.

The Hollywood Knitwear Factory in Kwun Tong in the 1970s when Hong Kong's textile industry was booming.

On his first day, he recalls how coworkers took him for breakfast. 

Relief from "the anxiety of hunger" was overwhelming, says Lai. 

"This freedom was the first feeling I had about Hong Kong and it never disappointed me," Lai says. "Never, until now."
After the Communists assumed power of China in 1949, Hong Kong's population swelled by 1,000 people a day during the 1950s as Chinese migrants flooded over the border. 

Most were "daring and entrepreneurial" survivors willing to take risks, Lai recalls. 

His twin sister was one of the so-called freedom swimmers, who literally swam from China to the city. 

She went on to become a major property developer in Canada.
"Hong Kong was a land of opportunity," Lai says of that era.
Within two decades, Lai had learned English, worked his way up the factory floor to the position of salesman and decided to start his own retail line. 

On one trip to New York during fabric sampling season, he bought a pizza. 

Written on the napkin was the name Giordano.
That became the name of his wildly successful, casual men's clothing chain, which made Lai his first fortune.
"I was stupid enough to think that if I called it Giordano, people would think that it's an Italian brand name," he says. 

It worked. 

By 1992, the group had 191 outlets, made 9 million garments annually and had a turnover of 1.6 billion Hong Kong dollars ($211 million).

Shoppers pass a Giordano retail store on a rainy day in Hong Kong, 22 March 2005.

"He's kind of a legend in terms of his business success," says Clement So, associate dean in the school of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

"Not only for what he did in the news media but in other kinds of industry."
Business was booming, but two things happened in the late 1980s that would derail the course of Lai's life.
First, on June 4, 1989, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to disperse young pro-democracy protesters, changing China forever. 

Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred to thousands.
Lai says he wasn't political at the time, "but I always had a very strong yearning for freedom because of my experience in China."
Hong Kong was still under British rule but barreling towards reunification with China in 1997. 

As the city watched the Tiananmen crackdown in horror, Giordano began producing T-shirts with pro-student slogans.
Around the same time, Lai says he got divorced from his first wife. 

"I thought I was a very eligible guy," he says. 

"That was something shocking to me."
Shortly afterward, Lai was interviewed by local journalist Theresa Lai. 

The pair fell in love and married. 

Next, he became a media baron.

An Apple a day
Today Lai lives in a white, gated house in an upmarket nook of Kowloon. 

Security staff are stationed outside the property. 

Paparazzi from communist newspapers photograph all who leave and enter, putting pressure on Lai's personal life and looking for signs that he meets with pro-US figures.
Inside, melodious Chinese hwamei birds chirp in tall white cages, dramatic art works adorn the walls, while giant bromeliads and orchids brighten each corner. 

"I love flowers," says Lai, with intermittent clips of an upper-class British accent, as he enjoys a breakfast of strawberries and egg sandwiches served on china platters.
The figure he cuts at home, where he regularly hosts politicians, journalists and influential figures to discuss Hong Kong's democratic future -- or lack of it -- is in stark contrast to his reputation as a brash, instinct-driven, ex-factory manager whose formal education ended in primary school.
That public persona began in 1994, when Lai published an incendiary column in a magazine owned by his Next Digital group, describing then Chinese Premier Li Peng, known as the "butcher of Beijing" for his role in the Tiananmen crackdown, as "the son of a turtle's egg with zero IQ" — a profoundly offensive slur in Chinese.

Jimmy Lai with his Chinese-language Apple Daily newspaper which sparked a price war when it launched in 1995.

Beijing responded then as it might do now. 

It penalized his clothing business.
Lai says Giordano's licenses were revoked across much of mainland China. 

In 1994, Lai sold his stake in the company, and the following year he launched Apple Daily, with a 100 million Hong Kong dollar promotional campaign, two years before the British handed the city back to China.
"It's my nature to be a rebel -- to be a revolutionary," Lai says. 

"I express it in business. Whenever I am in business, I create something different from the norm. That's the reason why I have been successful more than other people. I don't believe in incremental improvement."
He applied the mass-market ethos of Giordano to his newspaper: It was low cost, populist and sensational. 

Modeled visually on USA Today, it "shook the media landscape in Hong Kong in a revolutionary way," says Clement So, the Chinese University of Hong Kong associate dean. 

The paper didn't care for balanced reporting: This was advocacy journalism, with a strong dose of saucy celebrity gossip.
On news stands, Lai sparked a citywide price war, virtually giving away the sensational title at two Hong Kong dollars (25 cents), the price vendors charged to sell it. 

"Other papers quickly imitated without much success," says So. 

"The style of writing, the use of big photos. The pagination. Everything. There was a term called 'Apple-ization.'"
The newspaper became the city's most-talked about outlet -- a reputation it has maintained through its pioneering Apple Extra platform, which controversially animates breaking news events from murders to protests. 

The publication also found big success in Taiwan, a self-governed Chinese democracy which Beijing claims as its own territory. 

"Apple Daily was very lucrative in the beginning," says Willy Lam, a professor in history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
By 2008, Lai was worth $1.2 billion, according to the Forbes rich list.

Jimmy Lai protests during 2014's Umbrella Movement for democracy in Hong Kong.

With other media moguls unwilling to risk the commercial fall out of facing off with Beijing post-1997, Apple Daily became the city's sole publication regularly criticizing China. 

"They were so afraid of the Communists, they left me an independent media market almost to myself," Lai says.
The paper's uncompromising stance coincided with swathes of Hong Kong's media becoming more pro-Beijing.

"Basically, today people choose their media depending on what is their political affiliation," says Michael Tien, a pro-Beijing lawmaker and fellow textile tycoon whose G2000 clothing chain has more than 700 outlets globally. 

Few Hong Kongers back Beijing. 

Many are pro-democracy. 

Supporters of democracy and freedom identify as "yellow ribbon."

Many make a point of defining themselves as Hong Kongers, to distinguish their identity from the Chinese living across the border.
For Lai, a Hong Konger is someone from a small Chinese island who shares the values of the West. "The Hong Kong identity this time ... has really emerged much more into our consciousness," he says. 

"We identify as Hong Konger like never before."
In early 2018, a 19-year-old Hong Kong resident allegedly killed his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan and returned to the city before being arrested. 

There was nothing Taiwanese police could do; Hong Kong had no extradition agreement with Taiwan, or any Chinese territory.
In March 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam proposed a solution: an update to the city's fugitive laws that would allow criminals to be extradited to Taiwan -- and mainland China.
Lai was in the United States when the bill was announced and was warned by a US politician over breakfast about the danger it posed. 

"I really alerted myself," remembers Lai. 

"I looked at it again and said, 'Shit, this is horrible.' I knew it was going to be a big thing."
He was right. 

The bill ended up sparking nearly three months of often violent demonstrations in Hong Kong, with more than 800 mostly young people arrested on charges including "rioting". 

Protesters have paralyzed the city's airport on two occasions.
Speaking to Lai it seems that many of his defining moments were sparked by America. 

The name "Giordano" came from a New York pizza house napkin; when the brand initially struggled to make money, a trip to McDonald's inspired Lai to streamline its offerings, as the US burger chain had done; Apple Daily was modeled on the USA Today.
His top aide in Hong Kong, Mark Simon, is the son of a former CIA employee.
That last detail never fails to tantalize onlookers. 

For decades, one of the key charges against Lai has been that he is a CIA stooge, and the Apple Daily a tool of the United States.
Earlier this month, China's state-run media branded Lai and three other well-known pro-democracy figures in the city as Hong Kong's "Gang of Four" -- a reference to the group that tried to overthrow Mao Zedong and seize power from the Communist Party in the 1970s.
The People's Daily claimed Lai was part of a quartet of "secretive middlemen and modern traitors," as Beijing tried to blame the unrest in Hong Kong on foreign forces.
The pro-Beijing lawmaker Tien, for one, believes that Washington pumps money into Hong Kong's democracy movement to provide a "continuous force to destabilize China," although he admits he has no evidence to substantiate this claim.
Lai calls the idea of a US-funded color revolution "ridiculous."
"If the US is funding this the evidence would be so self-evident," he says. 

"You can't find even one person to stand up and say, 'Hey, I got money from the US.'"
But he does view Washington as a key ally for Hong Kong -- as that early warning on the extradition bill proved. 

When Lai returned from that trip, he began raising the alarm. 

Journalists at first weren't too ruffled, he says.

"Lam was flying high before this extradition law," says Lai. 

"Xi Jinping was taking her hand (at public events), she was walking in front with him, she really wanted to do something great for her boss. She knew this was a great opportunity. And actually it was almost. Because people really didn't pay attention to it at first."
But the business community was more alarmed. 

"All of them have had to pay something to get the protection of the people that control them in mainland China," says Lai. 

More than that, they understood the law could be used by Chinese contacts as a tool for blackmail; if a Chinese partner wanted to control their Hong Kong counterpart they could potentially report them to the authorities across the border, where there is a 99% conviction rate.
Opposition to the bill slowly mounted, starting with a march of 12,000 people on March 31, led by Lam Wing-kee, a bookseller who was kidnapped from Hong Kong by mainland Chinese agents in 2015, after selling tomes critical of Beijing. 
Lam steamed ahead.
The marches continued: 160,000 people, then 1 million. 

Still the bill remained set to go through the city's top legislative body, Legco, in early June. 

Finally an estimated 2 million people took to the streets on June 16. 

The bill was suspended, but it was too late to quell the anger it had stirred.
Tien concedes it's unlikely that Washington engineered a 2-million-man march, but as demonstrators increasingly wave American flags in the protests -- something Lai says is just a publicity play to attract international TV cameras -- the pro-Beijing politician wants an independent inquiry into whether the CIA is funding a color revolution in the city.
A senior US administration official has denied that Washington is sponsoring or inciting the demonstrations, and President Donald Trump also appeared to reject the suggestion last week, when he tweeted that "many are blaming me, and the United States, for the problems going on in Hong Kong. I can't imagine why?"

Freedom over fortune
Founding Apple Daily, and taking on Hong Kong's fight for democracy, gave Lai "a meaning in life that I never had" as a textile tycoon. 

"The mission," he says, "it has such a wonderful meaning."
The city's other tycoons have avoided wading into the crisis. 

"If you're a business person in Hong Kong, it is difficult to avoid the China market," says Lam, the history professor. 

"And once you are in the China market your investment becomes a hostage, which the Chinese government is never shy of using as a means to exert influence."
The closest that Hong Kong's richest man Li Ka-shing, who is worth over $31 billion according to Forbes, has got to commenting on the political crisis was publishing two cryptic messages in the many of the city's newspapers this month (Apple Daily wasn't one of them). 

The cryptic nature of his advice to exercise caution was unmistakable -- across the city, readers speculated about whether he was addressing the protesters or Beijing, or both.
"No other tycoon is willing to" be so outspoken against China as Lai, says Clement So, the Chinese University of Hong Kong professor. 

"That's what has made Lai so unique."
That outspokenness doesn't come without dangers.
In 2015, Molotov cocktails were hurled at the headquarters of Next Media and Lai's home in the early hours of the morning. 

"We're not shocked. Unfortunately, violence has become a regular feature of Hong Kong now in the political discourse. That's just a simple fact," Mark Simon, Lai's assistant, told CNN at the time.
Today, Lai has a personal security detail at his home, but the self-confessed troublemaker says he has never forgotten what it was like to be poor, and he has no intent on abandoning the masses in the crusade they share with him for democracy.
"The young people see no future for themselves -- everything is expensive," says Lai. 

"Even to live in a small room is too expensive for them." 

The land of opportunity that entrepreneurs like Lai and Li Ka-shing thrived in when they arrived in Hong Kong has long disappeared.
"With this extradition law people thought, Okay, that's the last straw, we have to fight. We have to fight in front of this last frontier," he says.
That fight might not be good for the finances of Apple Daily.
The extent of Lai's personal wealth today is unknown, but he fell off the Forbes Hong Kong Rich List in 2009. 

Big corporations with interests in mainland China, such as Cathay Pacific or Li's CK Hutchison Holdings, never advertise in Apple Daily. 

Hong Kong's previous chief executive, CY Leung, who the publication has long antagonized for his close ties to Beijing, regularly posts pictures on his Facebook page of companies that advertize in Apple Daily. 

"Apple Daily is public enemy number 1 for CY Leung," says Lam, the history professor.
Operating in this political landscape, coupled with a general decline in print sales and advertising, has squeezed Apple Daily financially. 

The newspaper's circulation is now 200,000 a day, two-thirds of what it was a decade ago, with 1.5 million readers online. 

Its daily ad revenue has halved over the past three years. 

Next Digital has posted a net loss for the past three years.
Earlier this year, the newspaper introduced a pay wall of three Hong Kong dollars for access until September. 

Next month, the publication is hoping that people will pay 50 Hong Kong dollars a month to subscribe.
"The timing is good for Apple Daily because people want news," says Clement So, the media expert. "Lai would like to get financial support from online readers, if he can do it would throw him a lifeline. But if not successful, it is a real worry whether he cannot sustain his operation in the long run."
Meanwhile, bootstrapping online outlets, such as Stand News and HKC News, are growing competitors in the pro-democracy space. 

By shooting chat shows on smartphones and employing a small staff, they keep overheads low enough to avoid needing Beijing-tied advertisers.

2047 on the horizon
To many, the year 2047, when Hong Kong will likely return to full Chinese rule,once felt like a futuristic date. 

But now that it is just 28 years away, it's something Hong Kongers can imagine in their lifetime. 

The fight for democracy has become more urgent, more controversial -- but potentially less achievable, as China's economic rise gives Beijing more political power to resist democracy.
"I don't know where (the protests are) going to end," Lai says, "but one thing I know, with the world watching over us ... I think Trump, the US, cannot back off (from supporting Hong Kong) now. They can only go further and further. Not financially, but politically and morally."
Earlier this month, Pence said that chances of a trade deal with China would diminish if Hong Kong's laws were violated by Beijing, and criticized the country's human rights violations as antithetical to American ideals. 

Trump also tweeted that Chinese dictator Xi Jingping should meet with protesters.
If mounting international pressure coincides with an economic slowdown and job losses, China could change, speculates Lai. 

"That doesn't mean that the Communist Party will collapse," he adds. 

"But it might mean that Xi would have to step down and a more liberal government will take over and slowly we will be on the right way." 

But there is no sign of this happening anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong's economy is taking a hit across the tourism, aviation and retail sectors from the disruption. 

Michael Tien, the pro-Beijing lawmaker, says that sales for his retail business were down 40% in August. 

"Nobody feels good anymore to come out and consume," he says. 

The Hong Kong government has announced a $2.4 billion stimulus package to help the economy grow amid the unrest.
For Lai, if the financial hub's economy has to suffer for freedom, so be it: The prospect of a struggle doesn't give people "an excuse not to fight."
"If we fight, we might have a miracle happen," he says. 

"If we don't fight, we have to submit to the tyranny. I just think that if we have been able to eliminate slavery we have the ability to eliminate tyranny, too. That's hopeful."

Freedom Fighter

A Hong Kong ‘Troublemaker’ With a Clean Conscience

By Andrew Higgins

The media tycoon Jimmy Lai is the rare prominent businessman in Hong Kong who openly supports antigovernment protests.

HONG KONG — He has been mocked for years in China’s state-controlled news media for being fat, which he isn’t, and denounced more recently as a C.I.A. agent, a “black hand” and a member of an American-directed “gang of four” supposedly responsible for orchestrating the Hong Kong protest movement that is now in its 12th week.

He says he isn’t any of those things, either.
This week the object of all that opprobrium, Jimmy Lai 黎智英, a Hong Kong media tycoon, rose in Chinese propaganda from the number three spot in the “gang of four” to its senior member.

That China has put much so much energy into demonizing a 71-year-old man is a measure of Mr. Lai’s singular status as the one prominent businessman in Hong Kong who openly supports antigovernment protests, routinely denounces the Communist Party leader Xi Jinping as a “dictator” and refuses to follow fellow tycoons in paying at least token obeisance to Beijing.
China’s relentless campaign of vilification against Mr. Lai took a particularly nasty turn last week when his name was purged from the genealogical records of his family across the border in southern China.
His relatives, according to a report in Ta Kung Pao, a Communist Party-controlled newspaper in Hong Kong that invariably refers to him as “fatty Lai,” deleted his name from a family tree going back 28 generations, declaring him a “traitor” to his ancestors and his country who is no longer part of the clan.
In an interview over a light Chinese lunch of shrimp and chicken in a glassed-in veranda at his home, Mr. Lai said the same relatives used to visit him regularly and have for years received money that he sent to them, but “of course they are going to deny me now.”
The Chinese authorities, for all their talk about the primacy of family in Chinese culture, he added, frequently hound families to put pressure on critics. 

“They are very good at frightening people,” he said.
Students took part in a protest in Hong Kong on Thursday. Through his media companies, Mr. Lai has provided a powerful, wide-reaching platform to the mostly young and leaderless protesters.

As the majority owner of Next Media Group, which publishes Next, a weekly magazine, and Apple Daily, a popular newspaper and website, Mr. Lai has provided a powerful, wide-reaching platform to the mostly young and leaderless protesters. 

Both also have separate editions published in Taiwan.
Apple Daily, once a lowbrow rag that ran prostitute reviews, has evolved into a more serious, though still rambunctious, journal of political and social news with a decidedly antigovernment and anti-Beijing slant. 

It also publishes a weekly column by Mr. Lai that has cheered on the protesters.
His weekly, Next, which began as a print magazine but now has only a digital edition, writes a lot about celebrities and covers local tittle-tattle, but also provides unstinting support for the protests.
The Chinese Communist Party, which controls two newspapers in the city, has squeezed the revenue of both Mr. Lai’s publications by pressuring companies not to advertise. 

Not a single Hong Kong company now advertises in his newspaper, despite it being the second best selling daily in the city.
The flight of advertisers, he said, has meant a loss of print revenue of about $44 million a year. 

But the online version of the paper, now behind a partial paywall, earns money from subscriptions and foreign advertisers who are not worried about being blackballed by Beijing.
While all the other prominent tycoons in Hong Kong have stayed silent about the protests or issued statements filled with Communist-style jargon about the need to “resolutely stop the turmoil,” Mr. Lai has not only supported the protesters but joined them. 

He marched last Sunday in a mass parade through the center of Hong Kong that drew over a million people.
“The establishment hates my guts. They ask, ‘Why don’t you just let us make money in peace?’ They think I’m a troublemaker,” he said, adding: “I am a troublemaker, but one with a good conscience.”
He has caused further anger by cheering on President Trump, whom he describes as “the only one who plays hardball with China. This is the only thing that China understands.”

This is a common view, too, among Chinese dissidents on the mainland, who see Mr. Trump, despite his describing Xi Jinping as “my good friend,” as the first United States leader to see China clearly since President Nixon visited Beijing in 1972 and began what they see as decades of weak-kneed policy.
Mr. Lai’s keen interest in China, however, is one area in which his views diverge sharply from those of Hong Kong’s mostly youthful protesters, who often want nothing to do with the country that took back control of their city from British colonial rule in 1997.
“I always feel Chinese because I belong to the older generation,” he said. 

Each year he takes part in a candlelight vigil held on June 4 to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. 

Most Hong Kong student groups view Hong Kong as a place apart from China, and stay away from the event.
Born across the border in Canton, the capital of Guangdong, Mr. Lai fled to Hong Kong in a boat as a boy and, until the Tiananmen killings, was a typical success story in the then British-ruled city. 

He stayed away from politics and diligently worked his way up from lowly jobs as a knitter and clerk to become the main owner of Giordano, a successful chain of clothing stores.
The 1989 Tiananmen bloodshed, he said, made him start thinking about politics and led to his setting up Next Magazine the following year, a move that quickly hurt his clothing business once he started writing insulting articles about leaders in Beijing, particularly China’s then prime minister, Li Peng, widely known as the “Butcher of Beijing,” who died last month at 90.
“I had always hoped that China was changing and would become a democracy. I was wrong. It was wishful thinking,” he said.
In retaliation, the Chinese authorities began closing his Giordano clothing stores on the mainland, his chain’s fastest growing market. 

He realized that he had to either sell up or mind his tongue. 

He sold everything but his media holdings for nearly $320 million.
That experience, he said, has helped him understand why so many of his fellow tycoons toe Beijing’s line. 

“As a businessman, you can’t confront the regime,” he said.

Many business people, he says, do not believe their own statements against the protesters, but feel they have no choice but to show support for the Hong Kong government and Beijing.
This, he said, is understandable but also a mistake because China’s leaders “know that once they cow you, they can always cow you. Once they have you in their pocket they will always squeeze you.”

For Mr. Lai, unlike the other tycoons, the protests are potentially a commercial boon. 

Apple Daily has been running advertisements that try to lure new digital subscribers by promising them that of every 3 Hong Kong dollars (about 40 cents) they pay for a daily subscription, it will donate 1 Hong Kong dollar to the protest movement.
Mr. Lai has become such a bogeyman for China’s propaganda machine that one newspaper has a photographer and video cameraman on permanent duty on the street outside his colonial-era house on the Kowloon Peninsula to record all his visitors — and, it apparently hopes, find evidence of secret contacts with American intelligence.
A group of mysterious “patriots” also gather regularly outside his front gate, arriving together in a white minibus to wave banners denouncing Mr. Lai, a father of six, as an “American running dog” and “the black financier supporting the turmoil.” 

He has given modest donations but his main support has been the unswervingly favorable coverage provided by his media outlets.
To put pressure on him through his children, one pro-Beijing newspaper recently published the name and address of a Hong Kong restaurant owned by an older son and urged a boycott. 

Business increased.
Mr. Lai said he stopped paying attention long ago to all the insults, though he doesn’t enjoy being disturbed by raucous renditions of the Chinese national anthem on his doorstep. 

The abuse has scared off some old friends, but, he said, “If you don’t fight, you get frightened. I have always been a fighter.”
Photographed whenever he leaves his home and often followed, Mr. Lai shrugged off the harassment as an annoyance that he has grown used to. 

“I don’t go out much.”