Lai’s goal is to keep reporting on evil, gossip and uncensored news -and still survive under Hong Kong’s new Communist rulers. He has installed the paper’s hightech newsroom in the shabby Kowloon garment district, where he got his first job as a laborer after slipping into Hong Kong from southern China at the age of 12. it was in the garment trade that Lai struck it rich as the founder of Giordano Holdings Ltd., a $300 million clothing retailer in Asia. In 1989, outraged over the military crackdown on students at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Lai donated $1 million to China’s pro-democracy forces. He also created a newsweekly, Next Magazine, which quickly became Hong Kong’s most widely circulated periodical. The mix of showbiz and investigative reporting led to lawsuits from companies linked to China and even a firebomb attack on Lai’s home by gangsters.
Lai expects no favors from China in 1997. After Prime Minister Li Peng justified the Tiananmen massacre during a tour of Europe last July, Lai wrote a scathing editorial calling Li the “son of a turtle egg,” a particularly livid Cantonese insult; Beijing signaled its displeasure by closing a Giordano outlet. Lai later resigned from Giordano’s board though he still owns 37 percent of the company. Giordano has said it plans to shift its legal home from Hong Kong to Bermuda. Still, Lai says, Apple Daily will not go out of its way to infuriate Beijing: “We’ll be flexible and wait for communism to fade away.”
In the meantime, he’ll continue to shake up Hong Kong’s journalism community. As local reporters and editors show signs of pulling their punches on Chinese political abuses, Lai promises that Apple Daily will “fill the vacuum created by self-censorship in the media.” To ensure that the paper will be quick on its feet, Lai has hired former pizza delivery boys as cub reporters to arrive at news scenes first by motorcycle. The paper’s political philosophy will be simple: the smaller the government the better. “If the government takes only 5 percent of my income in taxes, I don’t give a damn what it stands for,” Lai says. Lai is even hopeful that Hong Kong will remain relatively free under Communist rule. He believes that the target reader-ship of his paper - the young, affluent and well-traveled professionals - is so integrated into the global information grid that China can’t hope to intimidate them. Beijing can attack his editorials and apply economic pressure, Lai says, but “if we have the right readers, we’ll have no fear.” As Hong Kong’s fears of 1997 increase, Jimmy Lai will be doling out the message locals want to hear: don’t worry, be confident.
