It’s not a surprise. The revelation reinforces what we already knew: the Taiwanese had better not put any trust in a “one country, two systems” deal with the People’s Republic of China.
The history of Hong Kong since the 1997 handover to the PRC demonstrates what such an agreement and “guarantee” would mean in practice: “a territory where media could be suffocated without a single court order, where a chief executive could deny such conduct while in office and boast of it afterward, and where a publisher’s crime was not what he did but how much influence he had” (“Ex-HK head confession a warning for Taiwan,” Taipei Times, December 22, 2025).
Op-ed writer John Chen, a former Hong Kong businessman now living in Taiwan, is alluding to Jimmy Lai. What we’re re-learning is that Lai and others were targeted by the CCP-staffed Hong Kong government long before the mass protests of 2019 and the National Security Law of 2020.
Days after the Hong Kong court delivered its 855-page verdict against pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai, [Leung Chun-ying, shown above] wrote a lengthy post on Facebook explaining—without embarrassment and with a hint of pride—how he spent years privately summoning major corporations to squeeze the advertising lifeblood out of the Apple Daily until it was “compressed to near zero.”
When he was still in office, Leung denied doing this, but with Lai convicted and the newspaper dead, he called it reflection.
It is an extraordinary confession because it confirms what Hong Kong officials spent a decade dismissing as paranoia: The territory’s most outspoken newspaper was not defeated by the market, readers, nor law alone, but by deliberate political pressure from the very top.
Leung framed the action as necessary—even admirable. Lai, in his view, was simply too influential, too dangerous and too effective to be left to the market.
Leung was the chief executive of Hong Kong from 2012 to 2017. By trying to rationalize his efforts to destroy Jimmy Lai and Apple Daily, he “has stripped away the last illusion,” that the loss of freedom in Hong Kong happened suddenly in 2020 rather “gradually, methodically” all along, with everything that had come before laying the groundwork for the 2020 crackdown.
One difference between the Hong Kong case and the Taiwan case should further deter the Taiwanese from falling for the “two systems” lie.
There would be no gradualism in Taiwan. For almost a quarter century, Hongkongers were able to struggle for and exercise political freedom, including freedom of speech and assembly. And they did win some of the battles, for a while. A defeated Taiwan—whether defeated by war or by wishful thinking—would lose its freedom much more rapidly.
Also see:
Stop the CCP.org: Walking With the Hong Kong Heroes Who Woke Up the World
