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Jimmy Lai is a pro-democracy billionaire who owned the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily in Hong Kong. When China cracked down on protests in Hong Kong back in 2020, they also shut down Apple Daily and arrested Jimmy Lai. He was charged with national security violations and today he was found guilty.
The conviction, swathed in the formal garb of a nominally independent judicial system left over from British rule, was never in any real doubt. Mr. Lai, 78, has been pilloried for years by China’s ruling party and its loyalists in Hong Kong as a traitor, a crook and the leader of a subversive “gang of four” who must be severely punished.
In this case, he was convicted of two counts of conspiring with foreign forces to impose sanctions against Hong Kong and another of publishing seditious material in the former British colony. He had already been convicted and imprisoned on fraud charges.
This was a show trial. There was never any real chance Lai would escape prison or be allowed to leave China. He is being made an example by the CCP, partly because he had mocked and embarrassed them for many years.
Mr. Lai delighted in taunting fellow tycoons, many of whom repeatedly told him to shut up and parroted Communist Party talking points in pursuit of business on the mainland. He reveled in riling an elite polite society saturated with the hypocrisies of the colonial era and also of the Communist Party. Apple Daily feasted on entertainment gossip, gory crimes and for a time published a regular brothel review by a columnist who went by the name Fat Dragon. But it was also heavy on serious political coverage slanted in favor of demands for more democracy and exposing the riches of China’s top political families and cronyism.
“The establishment hates my guts,” Mr. Lai said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times. “They ask, ‘Why don’t you just let us make money in peace?’ They think I’m a troublemaker,” he said, adding: “I am a troublemaker, but one with a good conscience.”
On the eve of Monday’s the court ruling, members of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, once a boisterous mainstay of the city’s legislative assembly and its largest opposition force, voted to formally disband. The decision left an already crimped political landscape entirely in the hands of carefully vetted politicians whom authorities have judged sufficiently patriotic to take part in limited elections.
He was essentially convicted of being a US collaborator who sought to take down the communist party:
In delivering their verdict, judges said there was “no doubt that (Lai) had harbored his resentment and hatred of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) for many of his adult years.”
They pointed to Lai’s lobbying of US politicians during Trump’s first term as evidence of sedition and colluding with foreign forces, including his meetings with then-Vice President Mike Pence, then-State Secretary Mike Pompeo, and attempts to meet Trump himself…
His urging US officials to take actions against China in the name of helping the Hong Kong public “would be analogous to the situation where an American national asks for help from Russia to bring down the US Government under the guise of helping the State of California,” the judges said in their ruling.
“We are satisfied that (Lai) was the mastermind of the conspiracies” laid out in all three charges, they concluded. They added that the evidence showed Lai’s “only intent … was to seek the downfall of the (Chinese Communist Party).”
Sentencing will take place in January and Lai is potentially facing life in prison. But the sentence hardly matters at this point. He’s 78-year-old and has spent years living in solitary confinement. He’s not going to live that much longer. No doubt that’s the plan.
There has been some international pressure on China because of the case, including from President Trump.
In October, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada called for his release, Pope Leo XIV met the wife and daughter of Mr. Lai — who is Catholic — in a rare show of Vatican support for a Chinese dissident, and President Trump is reported to have pressed China’s president, Xi Jinping, on the matter when the two leaders met in late October.
Mr. Trump said on the presidential campaign trail last year that it would be “easy” to free Mr. Lai. Mr. Trump should deliver on that boast by leveraging the global groundswell in Mr. Lai’s favor and the recent reduction of American tensions with China after Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi agreed to pause their trade war.
Trump is expected to visit Xi next April. Hopefully Lai’s sentence will come up then. Given that he was convicted for interacting with US society and for expressing support for the democracy most Americans consider a given, we should make some effort to free him.
China is a dystopian police state. Lai is a victim of that horrible system.
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