To understand why Beijing’s account collapses under scrutiny, one must begin with Hong Kong’s origins. This inheritance shaped Hong Kong’s political instincts long before the world heard the name Jimmy Lai. Apple Daily (苹果日報) was not the origin of Hong Kong’s culture of dissent; it was the mirror in which that dissent recognized itself. He is the scapegoat required to sustain a fiction — that the people of Hong Kong have nothing against China. With these sentences, Beijing has done more than silence a newspaper — it has ended press freedom in Hong Kong.

Source: Taipei Times February 13, 2026 18:13 UTC