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Patrick Boehler

An online publication appears to have resumed publishing articles in China after a week of silence that appeared to have been punishment for questioning the party line on media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, one of Beijing’s most outspoken critics.
Lai had been portrayed in state media as one of the orchestrators of the demonstrations that brought tens of thousands of residents to the streets of Hong Kong over the last two weeks to demand real democracy by 2017.
His Apple Daily newspaper had been openly supportive of the protests. The media tycoon himself also participated in the rallies.
In the mainland, the protest triggered the largest censorship operation on Chinese social media so far this year and a steady flow of state media reports denouncing the protest and its alleged “orchestrators”, among them Lai.
One such report was a vaguely sourced article circulated by the state-run Xinhua news agency and government-affiliated news forums on October 3 which alleged that Lai was merely using the protests to make a fortune.
The report alleged that Lai, majority owner of the Hong Kong-listed Next Media Limited conglomerate, had made more than HK$1 billion in profits from shorting Hong Kong stocks days before protests in erupted on September 28.
Citing an unidentified stock trading executive, the report claimed to prove that the tycoon not only had knowledge of the starting date of the protests, but also that the protests were orchestrated instead of spontaneous.
TMT Post, a popular start-up news portal, ran a commentary on October 4, which cast doubt over the unsubstantiated but damaging report.
He Jiangbiang, an assistant editor-in-chief of the China Times newspaper, argued in the commentary that the Hong Kong stock exchange’s performance in the days immediately preceding the protests would not have allowed for such large profits. Stock exchange regulations would have prevented Lai from shorting stocks at such a scale, he wrote.
The commentary, which questioned the accuracy of the report circulated by state media, was promptly deleted. Following the deletion, TMT Post stopped publishing stories for a week, publishing timestamps on the newsportal show.
He Jiangbiang’s WeChat account has since been suspended. His Weibo profile with its 130,000 followers, where he complained about the deletion, has been completely emptied of posts.
“How can they punish us so heavily,” the journalist wrote in a microblog post that has since been deleted.
Both He and the operators of TMT Post declined to comment.
Incidentally, on Thursday, China’s Supreme People's Court announced tighter controls on the internet to prevent unsubstantiated reports from spreading.
Yao Hui, a senior official at the court, said people distorting information would be punished. He said authoritative voices online had an even larger responsibility for sharing inaccurate or unverified reports and would be held responsible. 
Rights groups suggested that more than 40 people have been detained in the mainland over the last two weeks for expressing support for Hong Kong's demonstrators online. 


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