Apple Daily, the feisty Hong Kong newspaper, has shut down, forced out of business by the Chinese government.
The paper’s closure was only a matter of time: Jimmy Lai, its founder, anticipated his own arrest over a year ago in a New York Times opinion article in which he bemoaned the steadily shrinking space for freedom of thought and expression in the Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong’s legal designation). In the piece, he warned of the increasingly repressive tendencies of the Beijing government and its surrogates in the city.
The arrest of Lai, other senior journalists and editors, and the shuttering of the daily, signals not just the end of an era in Hong Kong, but shows to all the world the Chinese leadership’s instincts and ambitions: It will silence its critics by whatever means necessary.