This week’s awaited “show trial” of one-time Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai focuses attention on the end of any semblance of freedom of speech in the former British colony.

The end of the one-country-two-systems “experiment” brought the succession of charges against Lai, and the death of his Apple Daily newspaper which is still the subject of some of those charges.

Accusations against three companies related to the newspaper had dated from the 2020 start of the National Security Law to its final edition the following year.

It’s appropriate in these columns to nod to the role Lai’s two daily newspapers – in Hong Kong and also in Taiwan – played in the fight he took on, and his recognition of the value of print in achieving those aims.

In the days when production excellence was recognised in Australia’s PANPA newspaper of the year awards, the two Apple Daily editions would stand head-and-shoulders above rival entries. I remember, among judges one year, finding it difficult to even score others on equal terms.

A visit to publisher Next Media’s facility in Taipei provided an opportunity to see firsthand, the effort that went into manually enhancing each photograph… creating pictures that “popped” and almost jumped off the page.

Out of the city to the north, I visited a printing plant where the same priorities ruled, delivering superlative quality from the two lines of Goss presses. As is well known, Australian-made ink and technical support contributed to that result.

I didn’t visit the Hong Kong plant, but it was clear from the specimens submitted for NOY judging that similar attention was being paid.

Apple Daily Taiwan closed in May 2021 as Lai was forced to focus only on Hong Kong, where the paper closed in June, even drawing an acknowledgement from US president Joe Biden.

Writing in The Australian today, former Australian journalist Rowan Callick describes Lai as one of the two most brilliant people he interviewed (the other was Nobel Peace Prize winning philosopher Liu Xiaobo), both of them “morally clear-eyed and resolute… and self-sacrificial”.

He traces Lai’s early days after he smuggled himself into Hong Kong at age 12, and founded the global Giordano clothing chain, before launching the “graphics-laden, sensationalist” Apple Daily and a succession of further media ventures.

Above all, Lai refused to concede the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party, which Callick says is the most serious crime in the People’s Republic.

“In the longer term, one wonders about the future of a regime that discards its best and brightest, including the great corporate innovator Jack Ma, founder of the now fragmented Alibaba, as well as Liu and Lai,” he wrote.

What Callick does not mention is Hong Kong English-language daily the South China Morning Post, which is part of the Alibaba empire, trying pragmatically or otherwise to position itself in an English-speaking world which sees China and Hong Kong in different terms.

Alibaba’s purchase of the SCMP went through in April 2016, since which time it has installed Gary Liu as chief executive and taken down its paywall, although readers in mainland China are still deprived of access.

The paper is not taken to expressing any views it may hold on the relationship with the state. Famously as the deal was going through, Alibaba executive vice-chairman Joseph Tsai said that fear its ownership would compromise editorial independence “reflects a bias of its own”, and argued for “a plurality of views” on China coverage. A different line, and a different time to the years from 1986-1993 when as one of the world’s most profitable newspapers, it was owned by Rupert Murdoch.

We’ll hope for the best, but fear the worst for Lai, now 76 and a past winner of WAN-Ifra’s Golden Pen of Freedom… not that that would be any concern for China’s “paramount leader” Xi Jinping or most Chinese subjects, who won’t have heard of the proceedings in any case.

Peter Coleman