The Conviction of Jimmy Lai, a Hero for Fundamental Freedoms
Today’s false conviction demonstrates the Catholic media magnate’s personal heroism, and the demise of Hong Kong’s independence from Communist China’s oppressive regime.
Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai is a hero for all people who cherish the fundamental freedoms of speech, press and religion. Yesterday, he was falsely convicted of foreign collusion and other vague national security crimes because he stood up for these principles.
Hong Kong’s kangaroo court will next hand down the unjust sentence, which could mean actual or effective life imprisonment for the 78-year-old and ailing Lai, a Catholic.
When Lai was imprisoned and thrown into solitary confinement five years ago, he was well known as an ardent champion of Hong Kong’s democratic system, free society and rule of law — Hong Kong’s separate system that the Chinese Communist Party promised to respect when the U.K .transferred the territory to it in 1997. The party predictably broke its promise and in 2020 began its crackdown on Hong Kong in earnest with the imposition of the National Security Law.
Lai was among those in the first wave of arrests. The party couldn’t tolerate his lighting a candle at a vigil of remembrance for the victims of Tiananmen Square, his peaceful dissent against creeping communist tyranny over Hong Kong or his role as founder and writer for his newspaper, the Apple Daily.
Lai always followed his star. A lifelong search for freedom and truth may have been shaped by the fact that the Communist Party labeled his mother as a “class enemy” and imprisoned her in a labor camp during his childhood. At 12 years old, he became a stowaway on a boat from Guangzhou seeking economic freedom in Hong Kong.
Starting as a worker on the factory floor of a textile factory, he founded his own garment company in his 20s. He became a billionaire at the end of the Mao era when many Chinese shed the drab suits signifying ideological conformity for Lai’s colorful and affordable apparel.
Mark Clifford, a friend of Lai’s who wrote a wonderful biography of him last year, entitled The Troublemaker, notes that Lai was self-educated and, as an adult, was deeply impressed after reading Friederich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom on free market capitalism.
In the decade after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Lai sold his company and put his money into founding Next Digital media and Apple Daily, which he ensured was a free press. He wrote frequently and feistily in it in defense of democratic freedoms.
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