百份報起家故事上左CNN：How 2 fugitive opium dealers started a Hong Kong newspaper war

Two fugitive opium dealers, a media mogul and an alleged smoking gun video: the story of a Hong Kong newspaper feud

In the late 1960s, two notorious opium traffickers from mainland China founded a newspaper in Hong Kong. Filling a gap in the market, the Oriental Daily News, with its racy pictures, celebrity scoops and crime yarns, quickly established itself as the city's best-read tabloid — until the Apple Daily blazed onto newstands in 1995.

As Jimmy Lai's pro-democracy paper ate into the Oriental Daily News' readership, a deep, personal vendetta took root between the latter publication's founders, by then fugitives in Taiwan, and the newcomer.

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An opium fugitive

In 1977, the Hong Kong Police issued arrest warrants for two brothers they alleged had smuggled 700 tonnes of heroin into Hong Kong between 1968 and 1974 from Asia's Golden Triangle.

But before officers had the opportunity to arrest Ma Sik-yu, widely known as White Powder Ma, he escaped to the neighboring island of Taiwan, which has no extradition treaty with Hong Kong. His younger brother Ma Sik-chun wasn't so fast: he was arrested but managed to slip out of the city the next year by boat while on bail.

The pair lived the rest of their lives as fugitives in self-governing Taiwan, managing their media empire from afar.

Major drug trafficker Ma Sik-chun was arrested by the police in 1970s.

Ma Sik-chun is escorted to court to face charges of drug trafficking. Ma was the publisher and Chairman of the Oriental Daily News.

In January 1969, the Mas founded the Oriental Daily News. In their absence, the paper was run by Ma Ching-kwan, the younger brother's son. Under his steerage, the newspaper became an important tool to lobby for the fugitives' return.

"After that, the entire mission of that newspaper group was one thing: get them (the brothers) back to Hong Kong," says Mark Simon, a senior executive of Next Digital, which publishes the Apple Daily — his view was echoed by others who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity.

In 1994, the English-language Eastern Express newspaper was founded by the Oriental Press Group, which publishes the Oriental Daily News, to connect with Hong Kong's English-speaking elites who ruled the then-British colony, and ultimately decided the fugitives' fate. It also added a more august title to the family stable, lending them more respectability, but the publication quickly folded due to poor advertising revenue and readership.

In 1996, a lawyer asked the government what would happen were Ma to return to Hong Kong. Drug-trafficking charges in Hong Kong, however, do not expire.

In 1998, the year after Hong Kong transitioned from British to mainland Chinese rule, the Oriental Daily News revealed Ma Ching-kwan had donated $1.7 million to Britain's then ruling Conservative Party in 1994 for "certain commitments," which it said had not been fulfilled. The governor of Hong Kong from 1992 until 1997 was a Conservative Party politician.

Publishing a photograph of Ma Ching-kwan with British Prime Minister John Major, and a menu from a dinner at 10 Downing Street he had attended on September 27, 1994 — three months after the donation had been made — the newspaper demanded a refund.

''We will categorically say that the Conservative Party did not or would not accept donations conditional on favors,'' an unnamed spokesman for the Conservative Party was quoted as saying in 1998 in British newspaper, The Independent.

After White Powder Ma died in 1998, his younger brother was alone in Taiwan. Some, however, doubted Ma Ching-kwan ever really wanted his father back on home soil.

"If his father came back, he would no longer be the king of the paper," said a long-time observer of the Oriental Daily News, who requested anonymity. "As it was, he had to send the front pages of the paper every day to Taiwan for approval before they hit the presses."

In 2015, Ma Sik-chun died aged 77 in Taipei. He was still a wanted man in Hong Kong.

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Harassment

During Lai's court hearings last month, it emerged that since at least 2013, Oriental Daily News has paid a team of reporters to follow Lai. The reporter whom the Apple Daily founder clashed with in June 2017 admitted in court to regularly trailing Lai leaving his house and work, taking photographs and video of those he interacted with, while always keeping a decent distance and never provoking him, he claimed.

"Why would you have a whole team of people being paid salaries for years on it and to follow around somebody you don't like?" said the close observer of the Oriental Daily News empire. "It must have cost them an absolute fortune."

But it wasn't the first time the Oriental Daily News had assigned reporters to tail people it didn't like.

In 1996, the Oriental Daily News sued Next Media for publishing on its front page a picture it had taken of pop star Faye Wong picking up her luggage at Beijing Airport while pregnant, without her consent. Oriental Daily News won a small sum for the copyright violation, but was made to pay for its appeal by a judge, who separately ruled against the paper in a case in which it was charged with publishing a series of indecent photographs of naked women.

After the rulings, a team of Oriental Daily News reporters started to follow the judge around the clock, and an article in the newspaper warned him not "to take any false steps." Photographs and articles in the Oriental Daily News detailed the judge's movements to and from court, and made a series of racial slurs against him.

In its Kung Fu Tea column, the newspaper wrote: "Oriental does not care if you are yellow-skinned or white or a pig or a dog. In our self-defence, we are determined to wipe you all out! Here, Kung Fu Tea warns the pigs and dogs: don't you bother me again. Otherwise, when I counterattack in self-defence, you will regret it exceedingly, you will regret it! I repeat: you will regret it very much!"

Multiple people CNN approached for interviews for this article declined to speak on the record out of concern for their personal safety.

CNN reached out to the Oriental Daily News for comment on why it had a team tracking Lai for years, and the concerns of interviewees of this article, but did not get a response.

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因CNN

抄PO

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