The Hong Kong High Court has charged prominent publisher and pro-democracy advocate Jimmy Lai with conspiracy to endanger national security in collaboration with a foreign nation. He faces life imprisonment in what has become yet another example of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s crackdown on any dissent.
Jimmy Lai is no criminal, no matter how fiercely Beijing’s puppet judges may try to paint him as one. Lai is a Hong Kong entrepreneur who founded the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily and used his wealth and platform to openly support free speech, democratic reforms, and resistance to Beijing’s control over Hong Kong. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) views him as dangerous because he combines money, media influence, and international attention to challenge Beijing’s authority and expose the regime’s repression to the world.
Lai cast aside fear and stood almost alone before a sprawling, shadowy force that chilled Hong Kong and the West: a labyrinth of power whose true face was hidden behind the mask of the Chinese Communist Party. For his courage, the High Court has ruled that he harbors “a rabid hatred” of the CCP and “an obsession to change the Party’s values to those of the Western world.”
“You must begin by stating the obvious: that Hong Kong does not exist. It is another province of Beijing,” Dr. Sung Xinyi, a former top official at the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party, told me. “The CCP Central Committee’s apparatus holds the Court in its tentacles; the CCP propaganda department edits the leading news agency wire that most media outlets share.” Dr. Sung defected to the West in the early 1990s.
Dr. Sung further argued that the CCP’s propaganda was evident in media coverage of Lai. “Mainstream media adopted the language that Beijing designed to describe Lai,” Dr. Sung stated. “They called him ‘tycoon’ and ‘mogul’ to create division and enmity towards him.” According to Dr. Sung, these terms were “intended to portray Lai as an outsider and a rich capitalist, rather than as ‘a part of the people.’”
“For the CCP, words are like bullets,” he said.
“Lai was the Party’s number one enemy in Hong Kong for years,” said Dr. Huang Kun, who, before leaving China in the 1990s, was an advisor to the CCP Standing Committee. “His newspaper was making propaganda efforts useless,” Dr. Huang said. “Every First Secretary gnashed his teeth and clenched his fists in anger when he read Lai’s name in the intelligence reports.” Jimmy Lai should be seen as a hero in Hong Kong and the West, Dr. Huang stressed.
The United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper echoed this, condemning the conviction of Lai, a British citizen. “It was a politically motivated prosecution, which I strongly condemn,” Cooper said. She added that the Chinese and Hong Kong governments targeted Lai.
Yet the CCP’s animosity toward Lai runs even deeper. In a poignant letter, Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), chairman of the U.S. House Select Committee on China, noted that Lai’s unwavering faith in God makes him a formidable foe in the Party’s eyes. Moolenaar explained that, being unable to command a person’s soul or beliefs, the CCP turns its wrath on those who hold faith. Lai understood that the Party’s threat extended beyond its own people to the entire free world. “You know that the regime that fears the faith of its own citizens will never respect the freedom of its neighbors,” Moolenaar said.
In an 855-page verdict, Hong Kong prosecutors tried to unmask supposed criminality in Lai’s unwavering and influential resistance to the CCP. Sifting through mostly private emails, they insisted these messages exposed a fierce, unbreakable hostility toward the Party. Each of the 29 chapters of the verdict dwells on Lai’s defiance and his urgent appeals to Western governments, warning that Beijing stood ready to erase Hong Kong’s “one country two systems” status quo and extinguish its judicial independence.
On May 27, 2020, the day before Beijing’s puppet National People’s Congress stamped its oppressive National Security Law for Hong Kong, Lai wrote: “China’s Communist Party is now cancelling Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and inserting Communist Party rule over Hong Kong.” He stressed that responding coherently to China’s rise under the CCP was “a defining challenge” for the West. Ultimately, it is this spirit of defiance that the CCP could never accept.
Lai is the most prominent Chinese dissident since the death of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo in 2017 and the second disappearance of Christian lawyer Gao Zhisheng in the same year. Both men, however, led the opposition in China while Lai stood up to the party’s propaganda and legal aggression in Hong Kong.
“What Vaclav Havel was to Czechoslovakia, Lech Walesa for Poland or Andrei Sakharov for the Soviet Union, Jimmy Lai is for Hong Kong,” a former Chinese senior secret police officer who defected to the West in 2001 and lives in hiding told this author. “Beijing wanted to silence him as early as the late 1990s.”
Few trials in recent Chinese history have drawn such intense, unblinking attention. Dissidents branded it a spectacle, staged not to seek truth or justice but to exact vengeance on a reviled foe and send a chilling warning to any would-be imitators. Dr. Sung described it as “a surge of fury from those who cling to power without legitimacy.”
The CCP’s iron grip has smothered the freedom and grace that once defined Hong Kong. Lai saw the danger and sounded the alarm. According to a former secret police officer, Xi craves “not just Lai’s downfall but his erasure, fueled by a long-standing animosity.”
Lai’s journey started in mainland China. At 12, he gambled everything, slipping onto a fishing boat bound for Hong Kong and the promise of something better. He slogged through long days as a child laborer in a glove factory, where the hum of sewing machines offered his first glimpse into the world of clothing.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a brutal crackdown on the protesters demanding truth and democracy, marked a turning point for Lai. Inspired by the students’ courageous call for a moral renewal, he boldly had his company print t-shirts in support. This small act of rebellion ignited his belief in the media as a powerful force for truth.
He founded Next Magazine in 1990, and five years later, Apple Daily.
Chinese dissidents interviewed for this column who understand the CCP mindset said that Jimmy Lai’s conviction may be just the start of more such arrests. Calling out this political persecution may not result in his freedom, but it will at the very least let the CCP know that their abuses do not go unnoticed.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
