I shared your sadness at the time and have lived also there a lot over the last 10 years, including when the FOO was going to be debated in June 2019, triggering the unrest. All this is actually a good thing if you love HK. Apple Daily peddled a lot of divisive fake news, doomscrolling and rumors that 'fake justified' the violence in 2019 - 2020. Slightly more real politic take: having provided a useful pretext for the long overdue NSL, they are shut down.
It's not about dissent. Dissent is useful. It's about narratives that go against the country, sovereignty and threaten security. CPC has no total grip on power. It has many internal factions jostling for power, and > 90% of the population are not party members. That's why it is so sensitive to disturbances, because it's a constant struggle to build something that lasts.
HK is not crushed and silenced, it is liberated from violence and chaos, and empowered to build a new future, if only its youth will take the responsibility and do something constructive to that end. It has not been 'caught off guard' by the 'speed'. The NSL was supposed to have been implemented after the handover, over 20 years ago, and local media and people actively provoked risks to country, sovereignty and security, through 2019-2020 thus providing a pretext for NSL promulgation. Even so, it took more than a year of, as you say, "horrifying wanton violence, where we witnessed the rapid destruction of the freest laissez faire city state in the world", for NSL to arrive.
It's not freedom that was destroyed tho, unless you consider 'freedom to violence and chaos' as freedom. It was a required-by-the-Basic-Law long-overdue legal-loophole that was ultimately the thing that was destroyed by all that violence, and, tragically a few people's lives who suffered terrible injuries and death. Maybe one day they can be remembered as important people who contributed, however unwittingly, to ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity in HK. To the new decade!
It's not about dissent. Dissent is useful. It's about narratives that go against the country, sovereignty and threaten security. CPC has no total grip on power. It has many internal factions jostling for power, and > 90% of the population are not party members. That's why it is so sensitive to disturbances, because it's a constant struggle to build something that lasts.
HK is not crushed and silenced, it is liberated from violence and chaos, and empowered to build a new future, if only its youth will take the responsibility and do something constructive to that end. It has not been 'caught off guard' by the 'speed'. The NSL was supposed to have been implemented after the handover, over 20 years ago, and local media and people actively provoked risks to country, sovereignty and security, through 2019-2020 thus providing a pretext for NSL promulgation. Even so, it took more than a year of, as you say, "horrifying wanton violence, where we witnessed the rapid destruction of the freest laissez faire city state in the world", for NSL to arrive.
It's not freedom that was destroyed tho, unless you consider 'freedom to violence and chaos' as freedom. It was a required-by-the-Basic-Law long-overdue legal-loophole that was ultimately the thing that was destroyed by all that violence, and, tragically a few people's lives who suffered terrible injuries and death. Maybe one day they can be remembered as important people who contributed, however unwittingly, to ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity in HK. To the new decade!