HONG KONG: Former Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying did not speak out in the heat of controversy or under pressure. He chose his moment carefully.
Just days after a Hong Kong court issued its 855-page verdict against pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai, Leung took to Facebook with a long post. It did not sound like an afterthought or a moment of self-examination. It sounded like a man finally saying out loud what he believed all along.
With no hint of regret — and even a trace of pride — Leung described how, over several years, he quietly called in major corporations and urged them to pull their advertising from Apple Daily. The goal, he wrote, was to drain the paper’s revenue until it was “compressed to near zero.” It worked.
When he was still in office, Leung publicly denied doing any such thing. At the time, the idea that the government was strangling a newspaper through behind-the-scenes pressure was brushed off as rumour or paranoia. Now, with Lai convicted, imprisoned, elderly and in poor health — and with Apple Daily long gone — Leung says he was simply offering “reflection.”
What he offered instead was confirmation.
His account makes clear that Hong Kong’s most outspoken newspaper did not collapse because readers abandoned it, advertisers lost interest, or the law ran its course. It was deliberately weakened by political power exercised quietly, persistently and from the very top.
Leung does not frame this as wrongdoing. In his telling, it was the responsible thing to do. Jimmy Lai, he argues, was too influential, too effective and too disruptive to be allowed to operate freely. What mattered was not whether Lai had broken a specific law, but whether he posed a political problem. Justice, in this logic, was measured by results.
What gives Leung’s words their weight is not their severity but their timing. He waited until Lai could no longer respond, until the case was finished and the damage irreversible. Only then did he feel free to explain how power really functioned. Only then did he acknowledge openly that courts were never the main tool — that economic pressure, advertiser intimidation and what he called “early struggle” were more efficient, and that law alone was never enough.
This is not the voice of a leader reckoning with past mistakes. It is the voice of someone affirming that the system did exactly what it was meant to do.
For years, Hong Kong people were told that everything changed in 2020, when the National Security Law came into force. Before that, many believed, there was still rule of law, press freedom and a meaningful version of “one country, two systems.” Leung’s account shatters that belief.
The actions he describes took place earlier — when the Basic Law was supposedly protecting Hong Kong’s autonomy, when the courts were still trusted, and when the city was being promoted internationally, and to Taiwan, as proof that freedom and authoritarian control could coexist.
Even then, Leung saw nothing wrong with using executive influence to punish a newspaper for its political stance, or with redefining patriotism as loyalty not to the country, but to the ruling party.
Perhaps most chilling is the lesson he draws from the case. Next time, he suggests, do not wait for trials. Do not rely on courts. Act sooner. Be more decisive.
For Taiwan, the implication is hard to miss. This, Leung implies, is what a “successful” version of “one country, two systems” looked like even before it was formally dismantled: a place where a newspaper could be silenced without a court order, where a leader could deny his actions while in power and later boast about them, and where a publisher’s real offense was not what he printed, but how much influence he had.
In trying to justify what happened to Jimmy Lai and Apple Daily, Leung has unintentionally done something powerful. He has stripped away the last illusion.
Hong Kong did not lose its freedoms overnight in 2020. They were worn down slowly, deliberately, and with the quiet approval of leaders who believed that the law existed to serve power — not to limit it.
If this is the system some still urge Taiwan to trust, then Leung’s “confession” should not be read as history. It should be read as a warning.
