After Hong Kong’s former Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison Monday under a Beijing-imposed national security law, former staff and readers described the verdict as grief over what they said was lost press freedom in the city. Lai was 78, and the reporting described it as the longest sentence so far under the national security law.
The case also resulted in jail terms for former Apple Daily journalists who had been charged in the same prosecution. The six co-defendants received sentences ranging from six years and nine months to 10 years, according to the Associated Press report filed from Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s leader John Lee said the case was not about press freedom, accusing Apple Daily of inciting violence and poisoning young minds, the report said. The Hong Kong government insisted Lai’s case had nothing to do with press freedom, arguing that defendants used journalism as a “guise” to commit acts that harmed Hong Kong and China.
Lai’s supporters and former colleagues framed the sentencing differently. Former Apple Daily reader William Wong, 66, said the paper’s shutdown marked a point of no return, telling reporters: “We’ve lost a newspaper that spoke for the people, and there’s no going back.” Wong said he had been reading Apple Daily since it was founded in 1995 and valued its sharp, to-the-point reporting.
Former journalists also described how Apple Daily’s editorial approach shaped the newsroom. The report quoted Francis Lee, a journalism professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, saying: “When the one at the front has disappeared, the effect is that the whole spectrum and operating space will become narrow.” Another former Apple Daily journalist, Kwok, said Lai introduced QR codes before they were common and used helicopters for aerial coverage of pro-democracy marches on July 1, the anniversary of the 1997 handover.
Kwok also said reporters could work without fear and described the newsroom’s resources as “endless,” though he agreed to speak to the Associated Press only if his full name was not used to avoid trouble with his current job. The reporting also described how Edward Li, a former chief news editor for Apple Daily’s online coverage, developed animated video reports with satirical narration that were popular locally, but that sparked debate over objectivity.
Li said he stayed at the outlet for more than a decade in part because the paper had a “trial and error” culture that let him explore new formats. He also carried that approach to Pulse HK, an online outlet for Hong Kong readers that he co-founded after moving to Taiwan, which the reporting described as a self-governed democracy. Li said: “If you never take that step, nothing will actually succeed,” adding, “This is something that (Lai) inspired in me.”
The reporting tied the arrests and shutdown to the national security crackdown that followed the 2019 pro-democracy demonstrations. Police arrested Lai after the national security law took effect in June 2020, and the report said they also arrested senior Apple Daily journalists, freezing $2.3 million of the paper’s assets in 2021, which forced it to shut down. It said Lai pleaded not guilty and was convicted in December of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security and conspiring with others to publish seditious articles, while six others entered guilty pleas in 2022.
As part of the sentencing, the report said the judges wrote that Apple Daily had turned into a newspaper opposing Hong Kong and the Chinese government after an earlier pro-democracy movement in 2014. Before Monday’s sentence, Li compared the experience of seeing jailed former colleagues to losing family, saying: “It’s like seeing your family members in prison,” according to the Associated Press.
The reporting said Hong Kong’s changes extend beyond Apple Daily, including growing self-censorship and shrinking public accountability. It cited a 2025 survey by the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association that found journalists see media self-censorship as widespread, and that the association has raised concerns about harassment through anonymous messages. Former reader Wong said officials now face less pressure over accountability and that ordinary residents have grown more cautious about talking politics, while Simon Ng said media outlets are more restrained and that “As transparency has weakened, it’s relatively more difficult to pursue the truth in news,” according to the report.
As the sentencing landed, the Associated Press report described a continuing narrowing of the operating space for journalism in Hong Kong—one shaped, as former staff and readers recalled, by the combination of prison sentences, newsroom shutdown, and fear-driven caution that followed the national security law.