Imprisoned Hong Kong entrepreneur and standard-bearer for freedom
Jimmy Lai is a 77-year-old British citizen currently imprisoned in Hong Kong for his peaceful pro-democracy campaigning. He was first arrested on vague National Security Law charges in August 2020, and again in December 2020. Since then, he has spent more than four years in jail, mostly in solitary confinement.
Born in mainland China, Mr. Lai escaped Communist rule as a 12-year-old boy on board a small fishing boat to Hong Kong, then a British colony. There he worked as a factory worker until he had saved enough money to start his own textile company. He went on to become one of the region’s largest fashion manufacturers, and eventually its largest and most successful fashion retailer, with his Giordano retail chain. He pulled back from these businesses after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, plunging into the media world in order to defend Hong Kong’s freedoms.
In 1990 he started Next magazine, and in 1995 he founded Apple Daily. Expansion into Taiwan followed and his group became the world’s largest and most influential independent Chinese-language media company. Next and Apple Daily promoted democracy, free markets, and civil liberties, and forthrightly criticized the Chinese Communist Party. In August 2020, some 250 police officers raided the newspaper’s offices and arrested Mr. Lai and other newspaper executives. Authorities subsequently froze Apple Daily’s assets, forcing its closure in June 2021.
While Mr. Lai supports democratic reform in Hong Kong and objects to the Chinese government’s destruction of Hong Kong’s institutions and freedoms, he is not a political leader, has never sought political power for himself, and has been a principled proponent of non-violence. Yet the Hong Kong authorities are seeking to destroy him all the same.
Lai has been convicted of and served prison time for four offenses connected to his attendance at peaceful pro-democracy protests, some attended by up to a quarter of Hong Kong’s population. He is now on trial under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law. He has maintained his innocence throughout a lengthy, contentious trial. The CCP may force him to spend the rest of his life in prison. Yet buoyed by his Catholic faith, “he is living in complete freedom,” says his wife, Teresa, suffering as a witness to the liberty Hong Kongers deserve.