The creepiness and dishonesty of the CCP-allied enemies of Jimmy Lai know no bounds.
Publishing in a heavily pro–Chinese Communist Party rag called Bastille Post Global, Lai Ting Yiu elucubrates on the hefty topic of “The Crushing Weight of Loyalty.” Subtitle: “Two Apple Daily Executives Expose Jimmy Lai’s Command-and-Control Empire” (January 14, 2026).
The “empire” was Lai’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, popular in large part because it jibed with the widespread feeling of Hongkongers that their rights and liberties should not be obliterated by the CCP.
A brutal reality
The two execs are codefendants with Lai. Lai Ting Yiu (shown above, inset in the logo of his Bastille column) says that during the mitigation hearing, they “laid bare the brutal reality of working under Lai’s thumb.” The brutal, suffocating reality that Lai had an editorial policy.
Sentencing pleas in the Jimmy Lai case took a stark turn on day two. Two of Apple Daily’s most senior executives—publisher Cheung Kim-hung and deputy publisher Chan Pui-man—laid bare the brutal reality of working under Lai’s thumb.
Through their lawyers, Cheung and Chan described an environment where dissent was futile, orders were absolute, and resistance meant risking everything. Both painted a picture of powerless lieutenants dragged down an illegal path by a boss who wouldn’t budge.
Wouldn’t budge about what? Sounds like, Lai wouldn’t cave on major decisions pertaining to the pro-freedom, pro-democracy editorial policy of Apple Daily. The “illegal path” that Lai hewed to—how eager Lai Ting Yiu is to describe it this way—was that of resistance to tyranny. The publisher and deputy publisher were helpless to resist the resistance to tyranny because doing so would have meant “risking everything,” i.e., the job.
Indeed, things got so bad that, according to “both executives,” they ended up “losing their free will under Lai’s command.”
They no longer had free will. Somebody should explain to Lai Ting Yiu that volition is a faculty of human nature. You have it no matter what unless brain and mind are crippled. One can, of course, be prevented by physical force from acting on the basis of one’s volitionally directed thinking and evaluating. This wasn’t the case here. Nobody was chaining Cheung and Chan to their desks or holding a gun to their heads to force them to work for Jimmy Lai.
“On Tuesday, Chan went further. She revealed she’d considered quitting but couldn’t afford to walk away because of her own medical need. She told the court she deeply regretted failing to hold fast to journalistic principles.”
Like the journalistic principle of submitting to tyranny?
A difficult choice
According to Lai Ting Yiu, Cheung and Chan opposed certain editorial decisions that they regarded as too risky given what they were dealing with, the thuggish Chinese Communist Party. Jimmy Lai held fast, vetoing objections. This is what makes him a bad guy in the eyes of Lai Ting Yiu.
According to Lai Ting Yiu, Cheung and Chan wanted to quit Apple Daily because of the risk of standing up to the CCP. Or because Jimmy Lai was such an ogre. But losing the income from the job would have been risky as well. I wonder if Lai Ting Yiu is conveying every relevant nuance of their testimony with complete accuracy. But setting this question aside, I can sympathize with their difficulties back then and their desire now to reduce their jail time. The way things were in Hong Kong in 2019, in that situation I’d have been afraid of the Chinese Communist Party too. While also wanting to keep paying my bills.
Who or what was most to blame for the difficult circumstances and hard choices of 2019? Not Jimmy Lai, the “mastermind” who was the boss of Cheung and Chan. Nor Lai’s fellow freedom fighters. The culprit was the Chinese Communist Party, the master of Lai Ting Yiu.
