112-691: The Special Tactical Contingent ( STC ; Chinese : 特別戰術小隊 ), nicknamed the "Raptors" ( Chinese : 速龍小隊 ), commonly known as the Special Tactical Squad ( STS ), is a specialist riot contingent of the Hong Kong Police Force under the command of the Police Tactical Unit (PTU). It was created in September 2014 in response to Occupy Movement protests with its main tasks being crowd control and riot control , including when
224-512: A Reuters Institute poll conducted in early 2021, Apple Daily was the fourth most-used offline source of news in Hong Kong, while its website was the second most-used among online news media in the city. According to a survey conducted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong , Apple Daily was the third most trusted paid newspaper in 2019. Apple Daily ' s editorial position favoring
336-464: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
448-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
560-441: A 10 per cent drop in its circulation. As a result, a number of newspapers collapsed: TV Daily ceased operations on the first day of the price war, Hong Kong United Daily , China Times magazine, and English newspaper Eastern Express , a sister newspaper of Oriental Daily , collapsed soon afterwards. In March 2015, Chan Pui-man became the first female chief editor of the journal, replacing Ip Yut-kin. In 2019, Apple Daily
672-455: A 500-strong contingent of police officers raided Apple Daily ' s headquarters on 17 June. They arrested CEO Cheung Kim-hung, COO Royston Chow, chief editor Ryan Law, associate publisher Chan Pui-man and platform director of Apple Daily Digital, Cheung Chi-wai, and charged them on suspicion of violating Article 29 of the national security law, which outlaws collusion with external forces to endanger national security. HK$ 18m ($ 2.3m; £1.64m) of
784-505: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
896-595: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
1008-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
1120-597: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
1232-700: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
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#17328581672841344-674: A focus on reporting crime, celebrity news , eroticism, gambling, and drug use. It carried at least three pages of entertainment news at the beginning but this was increased by eight pages by 2000. Apple Daily is described to have introduced tabloid journalism to the Hong Kong market. The focus on large colourful graphics and more flamboyant stories , such as celebrity scandals, racist targeting of mainland immigrants, traffic accidents and deaths, quickly made Apple Daily Hong Kong's second most popular newspaper. This type of journalism has also been replicated by other newspapers in Hong Kong. Apple Daily attracted public criticism in 1998 for
1456-522: A journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong , described the "frightening prospect" for journalists to operate under the national security law. Christophe Deloire, the Secretary General at Reporters Without Borders , said that "the Hong Kong government clearly seeks to take down a symbolic figure of press freedom." The Foreign Correspondents' Club (FCC) in Hong Kong was also critical about
1568-564: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1680-407: A poor economy and a competitive Chinese-language newspaper market. Political uncertainties from Lai's criticisms of the Chinese government also made media analysts pessimistic about the future of Apple . Its launch was teased by television advertisements where Lai was portrayed with an apple on his head, which would have been a shooting target for its competitors. In the first month of publication,
1792-434: A report about a woman who jumped off a building after pushing her children out the window. The woman's husband was widely reported to have little remorse for the deaths of his wife and children. Apple Daily published a photo of the man with two prostitutes soon after the deaths. It was then revealed that the newspaper had paid the man to pose for the photograph, for which Apple Daily issued an apology after public outcry. In
1904-538: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
2016-399: A significant increase from their daily circulation of 70,000 copies. The print run was later set at 550,000 printed copies. A social media campaign encouraging the public to buy the newspaper was launched, and received backing of activist Joshua Wong , singer Pong Nan , and lawmaker Ted Hui . Apple Daily also uploaded a live stream of their print production process. On 11 August,
2128-503: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
2240-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
2352-601: A social media campaign in support of students in the 2014 Hong Kong protests and its social media presence was considered a mainstream pro-activist community. Critical of the Chinese government, it was the only newspaper in Hong Kong that expressed optimism when Chen Shui-bian was re-elected President of the Republic of China in 2004. The editorial position against the Hong Kong and Chinese governments has resulted in advertising boycotts. In 2003, several major property developers in Hong Kong ended their advertisements in
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#17328581672842464-668: A system to ensure that each police officer could be uniquely identified and that officers wear and prominently display a unique identification number or mark violated Article 3 of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights . Officers attached a fluorescent stick (including yellow or red colours, depending on their team) to their helmet at night time for easier recognition by a commanding officer. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
2576-610: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
2688-563: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
2800-596: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
2912-689: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of
3024-485: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
3136-595: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
3248-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
3360-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
3472-484: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
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3584-496: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
3696-497: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
3808-540: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
3920-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
4032-735: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
4144-560: The 2019-20 protests , noting that "almost every arrested person interviewed described being beaten with batons and fists during the arrest, even when they were not resisting and often already restrained," along with multiple hospitalizations. In response to the Occupy Central Movement the police established the Special Tactical Contingent in September 2014. The media reported that the police had not officially named
4256-634: The Chinese Communist Party , which was widely cited by far-right influencers such as Steve Bannon and fellow anti-China activist Guo Wengui . A report by NBC linked the Typhoon Investigations to a fake "intelligence firm" and claimed that the author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, was a "fabricated identity". The original poster of the document, Christopher Balding, admitted that he wrote parts of
4368-525: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
4480-680: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
4592-579: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
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4704-561: The Newspaper Society of Hong Kong . Apple Daily is also known for its coverage of breaking news and current affairs in Hong Kong and China. The newspaper had exclusive reports on political scandals, including member of the Legislative Council Cheng Kai-nam not reporting conflict of interest in 2000, and former Financial Secretary Antony Leung for avoiding tax when purchasing a car. Apple Daily favoured
4816-527: The PTU suffered from heavy blockade or obstruction. Examples were obstacle removal, conducting arrests, providing first aid, etc. The STC would also conduct observational and command related tasks, to ensure and review the Police Tactical Unit 's use of force and tactics are appropriate, to further improve from past events. A report by Amnesty International singled out the Special Tactical Contingent and riot police for "the worst abuses" of excessive force during
4928-473: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
5040-591: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
5152-411: The pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong made it a subject of advertising boycotts and political pressure. After the controversial Hong Kong national security law was enacted, police raided its headquarters on 10 August 2020, a police operation criticized by some democratic governments and press rights groups. On 17 June 2021, Hong Kong authorities used the Hong Kong national security law to freeze
5264-1051: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Apple Daily Hong Kong (pro-democracy) Hong Kong (centrist) Hong Kong (pro-ROC) Hong Kong (localist) Macau Republic of China (Taiwan) (groups of pro-Chinese identity) Hong Kong (pro-democracy) Hong Kong (pro-ROC) Hong Kong (localist) Republic of China (Taiwan) (groups of pro-Chinese identity) Current Former Apple Daily (Chinese: 蘋果日報 ; Jyutping: ping4 gwo2 jat6 bou3 )
5376-515: The Chinese government. The newspaper inclined toward pro- Donald Trump misinformation during the 2020 United States presidential election , which was believed to relate to the former and future president's anti-Chinese xenophobia . In an opinion piece, it falsely claimed that "a vote for Trump is not only for the Americans' own interests, but it is also one that is for the survival of the free world"; in another commentary, it misleadingly criticized
5488-655: The Democratic Party and a "leftist ideology permeated in Western academia and journalism". Although the position of the newspaper and Jimmy Lai was echoed by many democracy activists in Hong Kong, Taiwan and exiled Chinese dissidents living in the United States, democracy experts in the US like University of Kentucky professor Sharon Yam and Los Angeles -based AAPI activist and writer Promise Li considered these views problematic for
5600-435: The Hong Kong pro-democracy camp . Its criticism of the Hong Kong government has been described as a marketing strategy. According to Fung (2007), the newspaper is also said to have sensationalised politics and produced public dissent. In 2003, Apple Daily was critical of the second Tung Chee-hwa administration , encouraging readers to participate in pro-democracy demonstrations with its front-page headline. It launched
5712-555: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
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#17328581672845824-568: The PTU uniform was not suitable for the contingent. A new black uniform together with protective armor was sourced from overseas in November 2016 and approved in January 2017. The new uniform was first used in operations on 9 June 2019. There was no requirement to attach their service number to their uniform although some officers attached it. From 28 June 2019, each officer attached to their helmet, in addition to
5936-535: The Special Tactical Contingent was first used by the police in a police publication in an article in Offbeat newspaper in 2016 and was used again the following year in the 2017 Police Review and in proceeding years. Despite the use of the official name from 2016, protesters and the media continued to use the name Special Tactical Squad for the contingent. The contingent is a small unit with members drawn from several permanent units to perform duties on an ad hoc basis under
6048-499: The Tuesday newspaper was published with the front-page headline declaring, " Apple Daily must fight on." Tsang Chi-ho, the former presenter of satirical news show Headliner , included a blank space in his regular column that simply said, "You can't kill us all." Many Hong Kong residents lined up overnight at newspaper vendors to buy the first printed copies. Readers also purchased the newspapers in bulk, distributing free copies around
6160-622: The arrest of 15 suspects on 10 September 2020. Lai was released in the early morning of 12 August after 40 hours in detention. Later that day, he arrived at the Apple Daily newsroom, and was met with cheers from employees. He urged staff members to fight on, with the support of the Hong Kong people, and not let them down. The assets of three companies, Apple Daily Limited, Apple Daily Printing Limited, and AD Internet Limited, as well as accounts belonging to Jimmy Lai worth more than HK$ 500 million, having already been frozen on 14 May 2021,
6272-542: The arrest of Lai the previous day for violations of the recently implemented national security law . Lai's two sons, four senior executives of Next Digital and three social activists , were also arrested on the same day. The arrests, coming amid Beijing's ongoing crackdown against many pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, drew condemnation from international governments and human rights groups. Lai and other arrestees reportedly faced charges of "foreign collusion", which included advocating for foreign sanctions , based on
6384-616: The arrestees. Government officials around the world condemned Lai's arrest and the police raid on Apple Daily . Tsai Ing-wen , the president of Taiwan , expressed her disappointment over the continuous erosion of Hong Kong's human rights and democracy. Mike Pompeo , the United States Secretary of State , said that Beijing eviscerated Hong Kong's freedoms. Yoshihide Suga , the Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan, voiced grave concern over Hong Kong's situation following
6496-424: The arrests. In contrast, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian approved of the mass arrests on the pro-democracy figures, stating that the Chinese government supported the national security law. After the raid, the executives at Apple Daily vowed to resume their daily operations. Following a surge of popular demand, Apple announced the plan to print 350,000 copies for their Tuesday publication –
6608-557: The assets of the company and Jimmy Lai. This move was widely described as an attack on press freedom . As a result of the asset freeze, Apple Daily was unable to pay wages and electricity bills, and had to cease operations. The final print edition was published on 24 June, with over a million copies being printed, up from the usual 80,000, and the newspaper's supporters lined up in queues stretching hundreds of meters in order to buy them. The newspaper's main and supplementary YouTube channel, "Fruit Seed", also shut down at midnight on
6720-407: The broad definitions of the national security law. Earlier in the week, the United States had placed sanctions on 11 high-profile Hong Kong officials involved in the city's democratic suppression. The police raid lasted nine hours, as the officers rifled through the business property and carted off 25 boxes of documents. The police search warrant did not disclose what they were looking for in
6832-408: The city. Within hours, multiple convenience stores had sold out all their copies. The high demand came from readers who wanted to show their support towards Apple Daily and preserve press freedom in Hong Kong. On the day of the arrests, Next Digital's shares originally fell by 16.7% to a record low of HK$ 0.075. An online campaign then emerged, which encouraged supporters to purchase stock in
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#17328581672846944-491: The command of the Police Tactical Unit. Members are drawn from the Police Tactical Unit (PTU) Headquarters, Counter Terrorism Response Unit, Airport Security Unit , Special Duties Unit and the all-female Tango Coy. Contingent members return to their permanent unit after completing ad hoc tasks. The contingent operates in teams of five members with the team leader either the rank of Sergeant or Inspectorate. The name of
7056-597: The companies' assets were frozen. Apple Daily warned that press freedom in Hong Kong was "hanging by a thread." The raid and arrests were criticised by the United States, European Union , and the United Kingdom, as well as the United Nations' human rights spokesperson. The Chinese central government has rejected the criticism that the national security law was used to suppress press freedom and said external forces should "stop undermining Hong Kong's rule of law on
7168-577: The company. Following the campaign, the stock experienced a 1100% gain over the next two days, reaching a record high in the past seven years. On Tuesday, the stock closed at HK$ 1.10 and became the third highest performer on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that day. On Wednesday, the shares fell over 40% after the Securities and Futures Commission issued a warning about the high volatility. A probe by police into alleged market manipulation led to
7280-584: The contingent commonly known as the Raptors and that instead it was referred to by the police as the Elite Team or Removal Team. On 1 December 2014, the media reported that the contingent had recently been officially named as the Special Tactical Squad by the head of the Police Tactical Unit, however, days later another media outlet reported that this name was used but not official yet. The official English name
7392-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
7504-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
7616-554: The document and later stated that the document had been commissioned by Apple Daily . Jimmy Lai later said that he had personally "nothing to do with" the report, but he admitted his senior executive, Mark Simon, had "worked with the project". Simon resigned following the NBC report and apologised for having "allowed damage to Jimmy on a matter he was completely in the dark on". The Hong Kong offices of Apple Daily were raided by over 200 national security officers on 10 August 2020, following
7728-566: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
7840-494: The erosion of press freedom in Hong Kong. Amnesty International spoke against the harassment of journalists, and called for all criminal charges related to the national security law to be dropped. The Asia Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA-Asia) expressed their support for Apple Daily , and urged Hong Kong's leaders to uphold the values of free speech . Keith Richburg ,
7952-402: The establishment of Apple Daily has changed the Hong Kong newspaper ecosystem by transforming broadsheet newspapers into tabloids. Lee said newspapers with a high circulation, such as Apple Daily , The Sun and Oriental Daily , are known for their tabloid journalism as well as making mainstream reporting (see middle-market newspaper ). Apple Daily did not join the self-regulation panel of
8064-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
8176-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
8288-599: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
8400-417: The headquarters. The police also brought Lai into the office for two and a half hours and paraded him through the newsroom in handcuffs, an act possibly aimed at humiliating Lai and to silence the press. The raid was live streamed by Apple reporters. The streaming footage included a tense moment when the policed shoved an editor for questioning the boundaries of the search. The police ordered for
8512-625: The lack of reinforcements, they were forced to retreat, with one constable injured. Protests were held from 6 to 8 November 2016 during the interpretation of the Basic Law . Squads were deployed to disperse the crowds after clashes between the protesters and the police started. During some of the protests in August, protesters threw Molotov cocktails , bricks, metal pipes etc., and the squads deployed tear gas canisters, rubber bullet, beanbag rounds to disperse them. Live-fire weapons were also deployed. Many of
8624-581: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
8736-516: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
8848-412: The live broadcast to be stopped, but the staff member continued filming the raid, arguing press freedom. Next Digital released a statement condemning the police raid and declared, "Hong Kong's press freedom is now hanging by a thread, but our staff will remain fully committed to our duty to defend the freedom of the press." Media access was restricted during the raid, with only media sources trusted by
8960-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
9072-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
9184-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
9296-470: The newspaper gave out coupons which effectively reduced the cover price to HK$ 2 ($ 0.25), despite a standardised retail price of HK$ 5 per issue set by the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong. The price was restored to $ 5 after a month, but the newspaper switched to promotion with T-shirts and coloured posters. The campaign boosted Apple Daily to 200,000 copies on its first day, to become the newspaper with
9408-644: The newspaper. According to Mark Simon, an executive of Next Digital , HSBC , Hang Seng and Standard Chartered stopped advertising in the newspaper in 2013 due to pressure from the Chinese government's Liaison Office . However, the Liaison Office denied it had contacted the banks, and the banks said they pulled advertising for commercial reasons. Apple Daily also said Chinese-sponsored hackers have attacked it almost every week. FireEye said in 2014 that denial-of-service attacks on Apple Daily were professional cyberattacks that may have been coordinated by
9520-619: The newsroom. Steve Li Kwai-wah, the Senior Superintendent from the new National Security Department, said they searched the area since one of the arrestees had an office on the assigned floor. Li also said the officers only "scanned" the materials to confirm their relevance to the case. Legal scholar Johannes Chan later criticised the move, stating that even a quick scan jeopardised the confidentiality in news reporting. International communities responded to Apple Daily 's raid with condemnation, with global organisations highlighting
9632-574: The officers were accused for using excessive force during arrests and while dispersing the protesters. Most notably during the 2019 Prince Edward station attack and the siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University . Apple Daily and New Tang Dynasty Television reported that SDU operators disguised as protesters provoked fights with protestors in order for them to be arrested. Newtalk reported that SDU operators disguised as protestors committed illegal acts such as setting fire on
9744-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
9856-489: The police being allowed. During the police news conferences conducted to provide updates about the search, numerous news outlets including Reuters , Associated Press , Agence France-Presse , RTHK and Stand News were barred. The media representatives allowed to remain were denied questions. During the raid, the Next Media Trade Union protested the police reading through the confidential news materials in
9968-440: The police operation for the protests was Operation Solarpeak. On 9 February evening, 2016, in an escalation of the civil unrest , protesters changed their tactics, overwhelming the Hong Kong Police Force , and the Special Tactical Contingent were deployed as a result. They arrived at the intersection of Soy Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street South at 4:30 am, where they quickly cleared protesters. However, after 5 minutes, due to
10080-625: The police's obstruction of news coverage during the raid, raising worries about propaganda in the absence of press freedom. Human Rights Watch stated that the raid on Apple Daily may be motivated by a desire to censor an independent Chinese media outlet. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said the national security law was used to "suppress critical pro-democracy opinion and restrict press freedom", and called for Lai's immediate release. Activist groups in Taiwan advocated for further international sanctions on Chinese government officials to support
10192-456: The pro-democracy movement and agreed that they not only benefitted mainland China's authoritarian government, but were also instrumental in the organization of the January 6 United States Capitol attack . In September and October 2020, the newspaper published a falsehood-ridden 64-page report produced by Typhoon Investigations untruthfully alleging Hunter Biden had a "problematic" connection with
10304-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
10416-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
10528-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
10640-441: The same day. Apple Daily was founded on 20 June 1995 by garment businessman Jimmy Lai . After the success of Next Magazine , another publication owned by Lai, he launched Apple Daily with an initial capital of HK$ 700 thousand ($ 89,750). Lai, a Catholic himself, named Apple Daily after the forbidden fruit , which he said if Adam and Eve did not eat, there would be no evil and no news. The newspaper launched against
10752-446: The same year, Apple Daily ran a front-page article claiming that lawyer Jessie Chu Siu Kuk-yuen absconded with more than HK$ 2 million of clients' money for her law firm. Apple Daily was ordered by a court to pay Chu more than HK$ 3.6 million in damages for defamation. In 2000, an Apple Daily reporter was sentenced to 10 months in jail for bribing police officers for information on criminal cases. Journalism scholar Paul Lee said
10864-502: The second highest circulation in Hong Kong. A price war ensued between popular newspapers in response to Apple Daily ' s entry into the market. Oriental Daily dropped its price to $ 2 from $ 5 per issue in December 1995. Other newspapers, such as Sing Pao and Tin Tin Daily followed suit. Apple Daily reduced its retail price to $ 4 one day after Oriental Daily announced
10976-448: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
11088-557: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
11200-399: The street as part of a false flag operation. Officers initially wore a dark blue PTU uniform. Each officer attached a team call-sign with velcro to the back of their helmet for example “3-1”. There was no Force requirement for a STC member to attach their service number or rank to their uniform although some officers did. During the 2016 Mong Kok civil unrest , the police found that
11312-543: The target of the Hong Kong authorities after its very strong and vocal support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong as well as its xenophobia. Jimmy Lai was arrested in December 2020 and sentenced to jail in April 2021 relating to the 2019–2020 protests . The offices of the paper were raided in 2020, its accounts frozen and five people including its editor Ryan Law and CEO Cheung Kim-hung were arrested in 2021. The paper announced its closure on 23 June 2021. Apple Daily
11424-588: The team call-sign, a sticker with a letter known as a Alpha ID to identify individual members of the team for example letters “a” to “e” if the team consists of 5 members. The Alpha ID was not unique to the officer and would be returned if an officer was no longer assigned to the STC and reissued to another officer. In November 2020, the High Court found that the failure of the Commissioner of Police to establish and maintain
11536-609: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
11648-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
11760-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
11872-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
11984-508: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
12096-400: Was a Chinese-language newspaper published in Hong Kong from 1995 to 2021. Founded by Jimmy Lai and part of Next Media, Apple Daily was known for its sensational headlines, paparazzi photographs, and pro-democracy, anti- CCP editorial position . A sister publication of the same name was published in Taiwan under a joint venture between Next Digital and other Taiwanese companies. In
12208-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
12320-527: Was an award winner of the Hong Kong Human Rights Press Awards for their reporting on Liu Xia , the wife of Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo . In 2020, Apple Daily launched the English edition of its digital newspaper. According to the most recent filings prior to its closure, it had a print circulation of over 86,000, and its website had approximately 9.6 million monthly unique visitors in Hong Kong. The paper became
12432-481: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
12544-514: Was prominently featured in the 2022 film The Hong Konger produced by American think tank Acton Institute . The film was received positively by right wing groups, and showcased the final days of Apple Daily's operations before being shut down due to the Hong Kong national security law. The newspaper was modelled after USA Today , with printing in full colour and concise writing. It also extensively used written Cantonese , when most Hong Kong newspapers used written vernacular Chinese , and
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