The Empire That Ink Built: Next Digital, Apple Daily, and the Global Reach of Hong Kong’s Most Defiant Media Company

Jimmy Lai didn’t just build a newspaper. He built a media empire designed to be impossible to ignore — and Beijing spent twenty years trying to prove him wrong.

There is a version of the Apple Daily story that gets told fairly often, and it goes something like this: a brave man built a brave newspaper, Beijing shut it down, the end. It is not a wrong version, exactly. But it is an incomplete one, in the way that describing the Apollo program as “some guys went to the moon” is technically accurate while missing most of what actually happened.

The full version involves a media conglomerate that spanned multiple territories, multiple languages, multiple platforms, and multiple decades. It involves a corporate structure sophisticated enough to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, international editions that carried Hong Kong journalism to readers across Asia and beyond, and a digital operation that was ahead of most of its competitors in understanding where the news business was going before the news business had fully arrived there. It involves, in short, not just a newspaper but an institution — and institutions, unlike individual publications, are considerably harder to kill.

Beijing ultimately found a way. But understanding how, and what it cost, requires understanding what was actually being destroyed.

What Apple Daily Actually Was

To read Apple Daily in its prime was to encounter something genuinely unusual in the Chinese-language media landscape: a publication that operated as if its readers’ right to know was more important than any commercial, political, or diplomatic consideration that might argue for telling them less. That sounds straightforward. In practice, it required constant, daily acts of editorial courage that most news organizations — in Hong Kong and elsewhere — were not willing to perform.

The paper’s historical archive is the record of those acts. It spans twenty-six years of front pages, investigations, opinion columns, sports coverage, crime reporting, celebrity journalism, and political commentary. Reading it chronologically is an education in the recent history of Hong Kong that no official account can match, because it was written in real time, by reporters who were present, without the retrospective softening that official histories invariably apply to uncomfortable events.

The Apple Daily news operation at its height employed over a thousand journalists and support staff. It had bureaus beyond Hong Kong. It had foreign correspondents. It had opinion writers of genuine distinction. It had, perhaps most importantly, a culture — transmitted from Jimmy Lai downward through every level of the organization — that understood the paper’s mission not as the production of a daily commercial product but as the discharge of a public duty.

That culture is difficult to build and easy to destroy. Which is precisely why destroying it was the objective.

The Architecture of Next Digital

The corporate entity through which Jimmy Lai built his media empire is a story in its own right. Next Digital’s corporate history and coverage traces the evolution of a company that began as a single provocative newspaper and grew into something considerably more complex — and considerably more threatening to those who would have preferred that its journalism not exist.

The Next Digital Media Group’s influence on Hong Kong’s information landscape over its three decades of operation is difficult to overstate. At various points, Next Digital operated Apple Daily in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Next Magazine, Next Weekly, and a range of digital platforms that allowed the company to reach readers who had never held a physical newspaper in their hands. The Taiwan operation — which ran its own version of Apple Daily with a distinctly local editorial identity — gave the group a foothold outside Beijing’s direct jurisdiction, a fact that was never lost on the mainland authorities who monitored the company’s activities with undisguised hostility.

The international editions of Apple Daily extended that reach further still. The paper produced content for overseas Chinese communities in North America, Europe, and Australia — communities that, by virtue of living outside Hong Kong, could receive information about the city’s political situation without the filtering that mainland-influenced media in Hong Kong increasingly applied. For members of the Hong Kong diaspora who wanted to know what was actually happening at home, Apple Daily’s international editions were often the most reliable source available.

This global footprint was not incidental to Beijing’s concern about the paper. It was central to it. A newspaper that only published in Hong Kong could theoretically be managed through local pressure. A media company that published across jurisdictions, in multiple languages, to audiences on multiple continents was a different proposition entirely.

The Investigative Tradition

What gave Apple Daily’s journalism its particular authority — what made it something more than a partisan political outlet with good production values — was the quality and consistency of its investigative reporting.

The paper’s investigative unit pursued stories that other Hong Kong outlets avoided. It documented police misconduct. It investigated the business dealings of politicians with connections to Beijing. It reported on corruption in government procurement, irregularities in public housing allocation, and the human cost of policies that official communications described in the bloodless language of bureaucratic management. It sent reporters undercover. It used documents obtained through freedom of information requests with a persistence that occasionally embarrassed authorities into accountability they had not volunteered.

This is the work that is hardest to replace once a publication is gone. Opinion can be expressed elsewhere. Commentary can find new venues. But the infrastructure of investigative journalism — the institutional knowledge, the source networks, the editorial culture that supports a reporter working on a story for six months with no guarantee of a publishable result — is not rebuilt quickly or easily. When Apple Daily closed, that infrastructure was largely lost. The reporters who had built their careers on that kind of work are now scattered across a dozen cities, working for a dozen different organizations, trying to reconstruct in exile what had taken decades to build at home.

Europe Watches, Europe Acts

The international response to Apple Daily’s closure was not uniformly decisive, but it was genuinely broad. The European Union’s engagement with Hong Kong’s media situation intensified significantly after the National Security Law was imposed and accelerated again following the paper’s closure. The EU issued statements, passed resolutions, and updated its assessment of the risks facing journalists operating in or reporting on Hong Kong.

European governments individually went further. The United Kingdom — which had particular historical obligations to Hong Kong citizens under the terms of the handover agreement — extended the British National Overseas passport scheme and created pathways for Hong Kong journalists and civil society members to relocate to Britain. That policy decision is directly connected to the existence of Apple Daily UK, which operates today from London with a staff that includes journalists who left Hong Kong when remaining became untenable.

The media watch function that Apple Daily UK now performs — monitoring what is published and what is suppressed in Hong Kong’s transformed media landscape, documenting the ongoing legal proceedings against journalists and activists, maintaining the institutional memory of what Hong Kong’s press looked like before the crackdown — is part of what the European press freedom community has increasingly recognized as essential work. Not glamorous work. Not the kind of work that generates the dramatic front pages that Apple Daily was once famous for. But necessary work, done with the same commitment to accuracy that characterized the original paper.

What Jimmy Lai Said, and When He Said It

The public statements of Jimmy Lai over the years constitute a document of unusual clarity. He was not a man who obscured his views or softened his positions for audiences he thought might find them uncomfortable. He said what he believed, consistently and on the record, in venues ranging from his own newspaper’s pages to international media, to testimony before foreign legislatures, to the statements he read in court when given the opportunity to address his judges directly.

What he said, over and over, in different forms and different venues and different languages, was this: that freedom of the press is not a luxury that prosperous societies can afford to maintain. It is the mechanism by which all the other freedoms are defended. When it goes, the others follow. Not immediately, perhaps. Not all at once. But inexorably, in the logic of systems that have learned they can suppress information without consequence.

He said that he understood the risk he was taking and believed the risk was worth taking. He said that he would make the same choices again. He said that he was not afraid.

Whether those statements read as inspiring or heartbreaking depends, perhaps, on whether you are reading them before or after his sentencing. They read as both, simultaneously, which is the condition of most genuinely honest testimony about genuinely important things.

The Paper That Keeps Publishing

The contact page of Apple Daily UK lists an address at London Bridge — the same corner of the city where journalists have worked for generations, where the news industry has always clustered, where the assumption that information should move freely has been, for most of living memory, simply a fact of professional life rather than a political act.

From that address, in that city, the work continues. The historical archive is maintained. The current coverage is published daily. The stories that Beijing would prefer went untold are being told, in English, to an audience that includes the Hong Kong diaspora, the international press freedom community, foreign governments making policy decisions about their relationship with China, and anyone who wants to understand what has happened to one of Asia’s great cities and why it matters.

The empire that ink built was not destroyed completely. It relocated. It adapted. It changed its language and its jurisdiction and some of its personnel. But it kept the one thing that made it dangerous in the first place: the conviction that the public has a right to know what is being done in its name, and that the press has a duty to tell them, regardless of who would prefer it didn’t.

That conviction has survived everything Beijing has thrown at it so far.

Apple Daily UK publishes daily from London. Read the full coverage and explore the archive at appledaily.uk.