Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong’s Imprisoned Media Tycoon

For most of his life, Lai, a refugee from Guangdong province who amassed a fortune in retail and expanded into the media business, personified the city’s capitalist zeal. But in the past year he’s become a symbol of something else: the lengths the government will go to crush opposition. Communist Party officials seem to have decided, early in their crackdown on Hong Kong’s protest movement, that Lai and his pro-democracy newspaper were their No. 1 target. In June, with Lai already behind bars, more than 500 police officers raided Apple Daily’s headquarters and arrested its top editors. After officials blocked the paper’s bank accounts, it shut down.

Some of the harshest measures were reserved for Lai himself. He’s already been sentenced to almost two years in prison for charges that include “illegal assembly”—specifically, attending a protest march with an estimated 1.7 million others in August 2019. The government has also frozen his assets and barred him from exercising his voting rights in Apple Daily’s parent company, and it’s now prosecuting him for allegedly “colluding” with a foreign power by calling for U.S. sanctions against China. For the rest of the city’s citizens, the message is clear: In the new Hong Kong, watch what you say.