Apple Daily: Hong Kong’s Most Fearless Newspaper and the Battle for Press Freedom
For twenty-six years, Apple Daily was more than a newspaper. It was a declaration. Printed on tabloid paper, sold at newsstands across Hong Kong, read by hundreds of thousands each morning — it was the loudest, most consequential, and most defiant voice for democracy in one of Asia’s most contested cities. When Beijing’s authorities finally silenced it in June 2021, one million people lined up to buy the last edition. Not because it was a collectible. Because they knew something irreplaceable was being taken from them.
This page tells the full story of Apple Daily — its founding, its journalism, its political courage, its destruction, and why it continues to matter to everyone who believes in a free press.
What Was Apple Daily? A Newspaper Unlike Any Other in Asia
Apple Daily was a Hong Kong-based Chinese-language newspaper founded on June 20, 1995, by media entrepreneur and democracy advocate Jimmy Lai. It was published by Next Digital, formerly known as Next Media, a media conglomerate that also produced magazines including Next Magazine and Sudden Weekly.
From its earliest days, Apple Daily positioned itself as aggressively different from the establishment press. It combined tabloid sensationalism — vivid graphics, bold headlines, celebrity gossip — with rigorous political reporting and an editorial line that was unapologetically critical of both the Hong Kong government and Beijing. That combination made it wildly popular. By the mid-2000s, it had become the second-most-read newspaper in Hong Kong, and by 2020 it was the fourth most-used offline news source and the second most-used online news source in the entire territory.
Its popularity was built on trust. In a media landscape where most outlets were owned by tycoons with mainland business interests — and therefore had strong incentives to self-censor — Apple Daily refused. It exposed corrupt officials. It named names. It printed things other papers were afraid to print. It told readers what was actually happening, not what the powerful wanted them to hear.
Jimmy Lai and the Founding of Apple Daily
To understand Apple Daily, you have to understand its founder. Jimmy Lai was born in Guangzhou in 1947 and fled to Hong Kong as a twelve-year-old stowaway with nothing. He worked in a garment sweatshop, educated himself, and eventually built Giordano into one of Asia’s most recognizable retail clothing brands. By the late 1980s he was a billionaire — and a man whose political awakening was triggered by the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.
Lai had produced T-shirts carrying protest slogans during the student movement and distributed them in Hong Kong. After the crackdown, Beijing shut down his mainland operations. He didn’t back down. Instead, he doubled down. In 1990, he launched Next Magazine, which fused tabloid entertainment journalism with hard political coverage. Five years later, as Hong Kong braced for the 1997 handover to China, Lai invested $100 million of his own money to create Apple Daily.
It was a bet on Hong Kong’s future — on the idea that “one country, two systems” could be made to work, that a free press could survive in a territory governed by the Chinese Communist Party, that journalism could be a form of resistance. For two decades, that bet looked like it might pay off. Then it didn’t.
Apple Daily’s Journalism: What Made It Different
Apple Daily operated in a media environment defined by self-censorship. Most Hong Kong outlets were owned by business conglomerates with significant mainland exposure, creating powerful incentives to avoid stories that might anger Beijing or damage commercial relationships. Apple Daily had no such constraints. Lai owned it outright, had no mainland business interests left to protect, and was already marked as an enemy of the Chinese Communist Party. This gave the paper a freedom its competitors lacked.
The paper’s editorial approach was distinctive in several ways. It ran investigative journalism that exposed the personal and political dealings of Hong Kong’s business and political elite. It covered the pro-democracy movement comprehensively and sympathetically, from the 2003 anti-Article 23 protests to the 2014 Umbrella Movement to the massive 2019 demonstrations. It featured scathing political cartoons and satire. It published opinion pieces that directly challenged Beijing’s authority.
In 2003, ahead of the massive July 1 march that drew half a million people into the streets, Apple Daily and its sister publication Next Magazine ran a photo-montage of Chief Executive Tung Chee-Hwa taking a pie to the face. They openly urged citizens to protest. They distributed stickers calling for Tung’s resignation. This was not subtle journalism. It was civic mobilization in print form, and Hong Kongers loved it for exactly that reason.
In 2020, as political conditions deteriorated rapidly, Lai launched an English-language edition of Apple Daily to reach an international audience. The move reflected his understanding that Hong Kong’s fight for press freedom had become a global story — one that needed witnesses beyond the city’s borders.
The National Security Law and the Beginning of the End
The inflection point came on June 30, 2020, when Beijing imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong. The law criminalized broadly defined acts of secession, subversion, terrorism, and — critically — “collusion with foreign forces.” With vague definitions and severe penalties including life imprisonment, it gave authorities the legal tools to prosecute journalists, activists, and opposition politicians for activities that had been entirely legal the day before.
Jimmy Lai was arrested on August 10, 2020, under the new law. Police deployed hundreds of officers to march him through the Apple Daily newsroom in handcuffs — a spectacle clearly designed to intimidate the paper’s staff and send a message to Hong Kong’s entire journalism community. He was denied bail and has been held in detention ever since.
The pressure on the paper intensified through 2021. On June 17, over 500 officers from the National Security Department raided Apple Daily‘s headquarters, arresting five executives and freezing approximately HK$18 million in company assets. With its bank accounts frozen, Apple Daily could no longer pay its staff or its suppliers. The paper announced it would close.
The Final Edition: One Million Copies, All Sold Out
On June 24, 2021, Apple Daily published its final edition. The print run was one million copies — ten times the paper’s typical daily circulation. Hong Kongers queued through the night to buy copies. Every single one sold out.
The front page showed Hong Kong citizens outside the paper’s headquarters, holding umbrellas in the rain. The headline: “Hong Kongers bid painful farewell in the rain: ‘We support Apple.'” The issue ran 32 pages, including a 12-page retrospective of the paper’s history. There were farewell messages from readers, reporters, and celebrities. There were pages of significant front-page headlines from 26 years of publication. There was coverage of National Security Law cases, a special report on mainland China’s detention systems, and stories about journalists imprisoned in other countries.
It was, in every sense, a newspaper doing journalism until its last breath.
Jimmy Lai’s Trial and Sentencing
Jimmy Lai’s legal ordeal became one of the most watched press freedom cases in the world. He was tried without a jury — three judges handpicked by Hong Kong’s executive authority replaced the jury trial he would have been entitled to under the previous legal framework. Prosecutors cited more than 160 Apple Daily articles as evidence of “seditious publications.”
On December 15, 2025, Lai was found guilty of conspiracy to publish seditious material and two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces under the National Security Law. On February 9, 2026, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Six former Apple Daily executives received sentences ranging from six to ten years. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called the verdict a violation of international human rights law. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the trial “nothing but a charade.” Reporters Without Borders called it effectively a death sentence, noting Lai is 78, in deteriorating health — his family reports his fingernails have fallen off, his teeth have rotted, and he has lost severe amounts of weight — and has already spent more than four years in solitary confinement.
Yvette Cooper, the British Foreign Secretary, stated that Lai had been targeted for “peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression.” The UK government, the European Union, Canada, and Australia have all called for his release. As of early 2026, he remains imprisoned at Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison.
Hong Kong’s Press Freedom Collapse: The Numbers Tell the Story
The fate of Apple Daily is not an isolated incident. It is the most visible symptom of a systematic dismantling of press freedom in Hong Kong. In 2019, Hong Kong ranked 73rd out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index. By 2025, it had fallen to 140th — a collapse of 67 positions in six years.
Since the introduction of the National Security Law in 2020 and the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance in 2024, numerous independent media outlets have closed. Stand News, Citizen News, and others followed Apple Daily into shutdown. At least 385 individuals have been arrested under national security laws, with 175 convicted. China ranks consistently as the world’s worst jailer of journalists, with at least 51 behind bars — including eight in Hong Kong.
A former journalist and press union chief, Ronson Chan, put it plainly: “There will not be another Apple Daily. Nobody dares to copy what it did.” The chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association described media bosses as increasingly viewing themselves as “an extension of the government propaganda arm.”
Apple Daily’s Legacy: The Spirit That Cannot Be Imprisoned
Despite the closure of the paper, the spirit of Apple Daily has not been entirely extinguished. In June 2025, Reporters Without Borders, together with former Apple Daily journalists now living in exile, published a special revival edition of the paper on the fourth anniversary of its forced closure. RSF offices around the world held rallies outside Chinese embassies. The edition was a tribute to media outlets continuing to resist repression both inside and outside Hong Kong.
Sebastien Lai, Jimmy Lai’s son who has been based in London advocating for his father’s release, framed it powerfully: “Apple Daily gave the Hong Kong people a voice at the newsstand. It gave them truth and, in doing so, it gave them power.”
The international journalism community has honored Apple Daily‘s legacy in multiple ways. Jimmy Lai received the CPJ’s 2021 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award. He and the paper’s staff received the Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. Lai has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. These honors cannot substitute for freedom — but they are recognition that what Apple Daily did mattered, and that the world is watching what was done to it.
Why Apple Daily Matters to the World, Not Just Hong Kong
The story of Apple Daily is a case study in what happens when an authoritarian state decides that a free press is incompatible with its political interests. It demonstrates the specific tools that governments use to silence journalism: asset freezes that make operations financially impossible, national security laws broad enough to criminalize ordinary reporting, show trials designed to deter other journalists, and the deliberate conflation of journalism with “foreign collusion.”
It also demonstrates the courage that genuine journalism requires. The staff of Apple Daily knew they were targets. They kept publishing. Jimmy Lai could have left Hong Kong — he had the money and the British passport. He stayed. As he told documentary filmmakers: “I want to make my life more meaningful.”
For anyone who cares about press freedom, the rule of law, democracy in Asia, or the question of whether “one country, two systems” was ever a genuine promise or always a lie, Apple Daily is essential history. It was the most consequential Chinese-language newspaper of its era. Its closure is one of the most significant assaults on press freedom of the twenty-first century.
The one million people who stood in line to buy its last edition understood that. They were not buying a newspaper. They were bearing witness.
How to Access Apple Daily’s Archive and Continuing Coverage
The physical newspaper is gone, but significant archival work has preserved its legacy. The First Amendment Museum has translated and digitized the final edition of Apple Daily, making it accessible to English-speaking readers worldwide. The China Unofficial Archives maintains documentation of the paper’s final days. RSF continues to document the cases of imprisoned former staff members.
For ongoing coverage of Hong Kong press freedom issues, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Human Rights Watch provide the most comprehensive and reliable reporting. The story of Apple Daily is not over. Jimmy Lai is still in prison. His colleagues are still in prison. And the fight for press freedom in Hong Kong continues — in exile, in courtrooms, in the testimony of journalists who left and the silence of those who stayed.