Lai Chee Ying
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Lai Chee Ying (黎智英 Pinyin: Lǐ Zhìyīng, Jyutping: Lai Zi-jing), English name Jimmy Lai, is the founder of Next Media, a Hong Kong publisher best known for Apple Daily. Born in Mainland China, a poverty-stricken Lai came to Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War. He became relatively wealthy, after founding the Giordano clothes chain.
After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 he founded Next Magazine. During the late 1990s, he started the Internet-based grocery and electronics home delivery service, adMart, which incurred large losses and failed.
He has been a controversial critic of the People's Republic of China government. In a 1994 newspaper column, he told Premier of the PRC Li Peng to "drop dead," and called the Communist Party of China, "a monopoly that charges a premium for lousy service". As a result, his publications are mostly banned in the rest of the People's Republic of China, causing him to leave Giordano in order to save its business in mainland China. The hostility the PRC has towards Lai has further increased his publicity, if not popularity.
Lai is best known for introducing reader-centric philosophy and paparazzi into newspaper business in Hong Kong. In the best selling magazine Next Magazine and the newspaper Apple Daily, one can find both pornography and academic articles, which attract a wide range of readers and amazingly, many of whom are also critics. In 2000, Lai moved to Taiwan to oversee the startup operations for Next Media's Taiwan editions, which have also had a great impact on the Taiwanese media.