Jimmy Lai owns two media shops which can be unapologetically pro-democracy and significant of Beijing
Hong Kong:
Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai, one of many metropolis’s most vocal Beijing critics, was arrested Monday underneath a brand new nationwide safety legislation for colluding with international forces, deepening a crackdown on democracy supporters.
“They arrested him at his home at about 7am. Our legal professionals are on the way in which to the police station,” Mark Simon, a detailed aide, informed AFP, including that different members of Lai’s media group had additionally been arrested.
A police supply talking on situation of anonymity informed AFP Lai was arrested for colluding with international forces — one of many new nationwide safety offences — and fraud.
Lai owns the Apple Day by day newspaper and Subsequent Journal, two shops unapologetically pro-democracy and significant of Beijing.
On Twitter, Simon stated officers have been executing search warrants at each Lai’s mansion and his son’s home.
Few Hong Kongers generate the extent of vitriol from Beijing that Lai does.
For a lot of residents of the stressed semi-autonomous metropolis, he’s an unlikely hero — a pugnacious, self-made tabloid proprietor and the one tycoon prepared to criticise Beijing.
However in China’s state media he’s a “traitor”, the most important “black hand” behind final yr’s enormous pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and the pinnacle of a brand new “Gang of 4” conspiring with international nations to undermine the motherland.
Lai spoke to AFP in mid-June, two weeks earlier than the brand new safety legislation was imposed on town.
“I am ready for jail,” the 72-year-old stated. “If it comes, I’ll have the chance to learn books I have not learn. The one factor I can do is to be constructive.”
He described the legislation as “a dying knell for Hong Kong”.
“It’s going to supersede or destroy our rule of legislation and destroy our worldwide monetary standing,” he stated.
He additionally stated he feared authorities would come after his journalists.
The safety legislation targets secession, subversion, terrorism and colluding with international forces.
It was introduced in to quell final yr’s typically violent protests.
Each China and Hong Kong have stated it won’t have an effect on individuals’s freedoms and solely targets a minority.
However its broadly-worded provisions criminalise sure political speech, akin to advocating for sanctions, larger autonomy or independence for Hong Kong.
Critics, together with many Western nations, imagine the legislation has ended the important thing liberties and autonomy that Beijing promised Hong Kong might preserve after its 1997 handover by Britain.
Lai isn’t any stranger to arrest.
He’s already being prosecuted for participating in final yr’s protests — and for defying a police ban to attend a vigil in early June commemorating Beijing’s lethal Tiananmen crackdown in 1989.
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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