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Newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai, China’s best-known political prisoner, is fighting for his life in a Hong Kong courtroom.
Americans need to add their voices to the international campaign for his immediate release.
Lai is a 77-year-old British citizen who ran the most outspoken pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong — until 2020, when its authorities threw him in jail for his full-throated defense of freedom.
He has been held captive for more than 1,500 days, most in solitary confinement.
A devout Catholic, he has been denied Mass for more than two years.
Lai isn’t just a successful newspaperman who went behind bars in defense of freedom.
He’s one of Hong Kong’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Lai’s rags-to-riches tale of success mirrors the territory’s rise — and the loss of its freedoms.
Landing in Hong Kong as a penniless 12-year-old, he literally worked himself up from the factory floor — where he slept his first night — to factory owner.
Two decades after he arrived, he was running Hong Kong’s largest sweater factory, selling to world-class brands like The Limited.
Then he started his own fast-fashion chain, Giordano, which became the inspiration for Japan’s Uniqlo.
Lai moved from the rag trade to the media after the brutal 1989 Tiananmen massacre, believing that free media — and more transparency — would hasten the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party.
His newspaper and magazine empire quickly became the most important independent Chinese-language media group in the world, employing 4,000 people in Hong Kong and in newly democratic Taiwan.
Lai wasn’t shy about calling out Chinese leaders by name: He famously derided Premier Li Peng, the so-called Butcher of Beijing for his role in the Tiananmen killings, as a “turtle egg” (a bastard).
A major funder of the Hong Kong democracy movement, Lai poured more than $100 million into the freedom agenda.
His Apple Daily newspaper helped mobilize protesters — as many as 2 million at a time in the heady summer of democracy in 2019.
Lai summed up everything the Chinese Communists don’t like: He’s got money, so he could fund the democracy movement.
He had a megaphone, with his newspapers and magazines; Communists only want propaganda that serves the state.
And he’s got principles that he’s willing to fight for.
He could have escaped jail by fleeing to one of his homes abroad.
But, as he told one colleague who urged him to leave, he’d “rather be hanging from a lamppost” than give the Communists the satisfaction of saying he ran away.
His fearlessness comes from a childhood forged in the horrors of Mao’s China.
When his mother wasn’t in a labor camp, Lai had to watch as mobs heckled her and forced her to kneel on broken glass wearing a dunce’s cap, derided as an enemy of the people for having married into a wealthy family.
Lai escaped China during a famine that killed as many as 45 million people.
He might well have been one of those if he’d stayed.
That he not only survived but prospered has given him an unshakeable confidence.
He can’t be bought off or bullied.
Neither carrots nor sticks have prompted Lai to kowtow.
President Donald Trump has promised “100%” to get Lai freed; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said Lai’s release is a priority.
This month his son Sebastien Lai delivered a letter to No. 10 Downing Street urging Starmer to speed his father’s release — a father who is in prison because he stood up for British values like free speech and the rule of law.
It’s in China’s interest to let Lai go, if only to ease the pressure on Hong Kong.
After all, it’s bad optics for a global financial center to hold political prisoners.
China’s economic slump poses challenges enough without adding political tension to the mix.
Lai is a great businessman who has deep ties to the United States.
During his days as an up-and-coming sweater maker, he spent months at a time in New York City, drinking in the spirit of freedom he found in his second home.
He made significant investments in inner-city Detroit housing nearly two decades ago, and his daughter lives in New York.
Two weeks ago, Lai finished testifying, after 52 days on the stand, in a marathon national-security-law trial that began in late 2023.
A guilty verdict is inevitable.
A lengthy sentence — at his age, effectively a life sentence — will follow.
He’s on trial now in large part because of meetings with officials during the first Trump administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Lai has fought for freedom and he deserves our support.
Strong in spirit, he’s aging, and his health is deteriorating.
It’s time to bring him home to his family.
Mark L. Clifford is author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”
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