RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/claudia-rosett/2020/02/28/jimmy-lais-warning-about-china-n378733

Surely China’s Communist Party henchmen have enough on their hands, as they hustle to disappear outspoken bloggers, kick out Wall Street Journal reporters, and repurpose parts of the CCP’s vast machinery of surveillance and coercion to police President Xi Jinping’s “People’s War” on the deadly new coronavirus — which achieved ruinous breakout in Wuhan early last month, while China’s authorities were busy detaining and silencing the honest local doctors who tried to sound a warning. But when it comes to ramping up repression, there’s always time for more. On Friday, China’s satrap administration in Hong Kong arrested one of the city’s longtime leading advocates of democracy, 71-year-old newspaper owner Jimmy Lai.

Let’s be clear: Jimmy Lai is one of the world’s most clarion voices for freedom. In Hong Kong these days, that takes tremendous courage. Born in China, he came to Hong Kong at the age of 12, made his fortune in the garment industry, and in 1995 founded a pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily. Under British colonial rule, and under China’s increasingly heavy boot since the 1997 handover, Lai has argued the case for democracy, in person and in print, and turned out, again and again, to take part in peaceful protests. Earlier this month, Jimmy Lai published a superb op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, under the headline “China’s Facade of Stability,” spelling out that “the spread of the coronavirus has revealed a truth that poses a much greater risk to Mr. Xi: There is no cure for Chinese communism except the collapse of the party.” Noting that “Deception is China’s true rule of law,” and citing the silencing at a critical moment of the Wuhan doctors who tried to warn of the virus, Lai spelled out, “This is the problem now before the world: the rise of a Goliath-like China no one trusts.”

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2020/08/10/hong-kong-crackdown-200-police-raid-newspaper-arrest-beijing-critic-jimmy-lai-n770499

Hong Kong Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai was taken from his paper’s offices in handcuffs Monday morning in a raid involving more than 200 police.

Police reportedly took box after box of “evidence,” although it’s unclear what crime Lai might have committed aside from being in favor of democracy and speaking out against the authoritarian Communist government in Beijing.

Reuters reports:

Apple Daily’s Editor-in-Chief Ryan Law, who was helping film and comment on the Facebook live feed, could be seen rushing about the building as he tried to report on events breaking in his own newsroom.

“This is, I believe, the first time in Hong Kong that police have initiated a mass search on a media outlet like this,” he said, panting, as he scaled a back staircase with a colleague to get around the mass of police officers.

And:

Staffers said they asked police what legal grounds they had for entering. But these questions were largely ignored as more than 200 police streamed in, according to a live feed of the unfolding drama.