Courtesy: CNN (CNN) — Jimmy Lai fled mainland China more than 60 years ago, smuggling himself into Hong Kong on a fishing boat at age 12 to escape the chaos of the Communist Party. This week, Beijing finally caught up with him, after a law it had imposed on Hong Kong last year was used to take down his pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. The iconic Hong Kong tabloid Lai founded shuttered Thursday due to an untenable environment in which its journalists had been arrested under the vaguely worded National Security Law and assets had been frozen, parent company Next Media has said. Lai, now in his mid-70s, and five of the paper's top editors and executives have also been arrested under the sweeping law for alleged collusion with foreign forces, ostensibly over articles they wrote and interviews Lai gave with media outlets calling for sanctions on Hong Kong.