Jimmy Lai and the Price of Telling the Truth

Dozens of those lined up outside the Hong Kong court where Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years on Monday had been there all night, keeping vigil. They’d camped out so as to be in position to put themselves at risk by standing with Lai, whose only crime was publishing pro-democracy journalism and then refusing to back down. 

Courage is contagious, so how right Beijing is to see this 78-year-old Chinese-born UK citizen – “a man unfortunately very close to dying,” his son said on Tuesday – as a threat to lies. 

In December, after a two-year show trial, he was found guilty of a conspiracy to collude with foreign forces – meeting with American officials – and a conspiracy to publish seditious materials, a.k.a. facts, in Apple Daily, the popular newspaper he founded in 1995. 

“This is a dark day in Hong Kong’s history,” with dissent now treated as a serious crime, one of Lai’s lawyers, Jonathan Price, said at a Tuesday news conference via Zoom. Press freedom is only a memory in the once-autonomous territory. 

“This 20 years, it’s a farce,” Sebastien Lai, the publisher’s 31-year-old son, told reporters, and is “tantamount to a death sentence.”

After some 2 million of Hong Kong’s 7.4 million residents protested China’s 2019 attempt to disassemble the rule of law in the city, the Chinese Communist Party responded by imposing the 2020 national security law criminalizing free speech. Lai could have fled, but chose to remain instead, and has been behind bars for five years. His sentence was the harshest penalty ever imposed under that law.

One thing that does give Lai’s family a measure of comfort, Sebastien said, is that after his sentencing, “he was stoic, and he smiled, almost as an act of defiance.” Of course, he and all of his loved ones are afraid, just as anyone would be, his son said. “But we refuse to be intimidated.”

Everyone who knows Lai’s story knows that this is not just anyone. He raised himself after Mao sent his mother to a labor camp, and at 12 or 13 – even he doesn’t know his exact age – he escaped to Hong Kong as a stowaway on a fishing boat. Then, starting with nothing, he made a fortune in the clothing business. He got into media after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and he could see that it would get “harder and harder to tell the truth” after Britain’s 1997 handover of Hong Kong back to China. He saw too, his son told me three years ago, that “people would self-censor and would need a publication that would hold truth to power and was also very entertaining.”

Now governments all over the world, ours included, are pushing for his release, and five members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, just nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. But if China does not relent and release him, this faithful Catholic will become something more: a martyr for his faith as well as for democracy. 

If they don’t do the right thing, it is no exaggeration to say that they will make him a modern-day Thomas More.

That many people still remember More’s story nearly 500 years after his death, you would think, give China pause. Centuries after Henry VIII had his former Lord Chancellor beheaded for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy recognizing Henry as head of the Church of England, many of us remember how he refused ever to betray what he believed. 

“I die the king’s good servant, but God’s first,” More said before being put to death. He didn’t just smile in defiance, but quipped to his executioners that they could help him climb up the scaffold, but he would see himself down. 

In a Tuesday phone interview, Lai’s 29-year-old daughter, Claire Lai, told me that he is “like St. Thomas More” who “even in his last words did not stand against something, but for something. He stands for freedom.” Officials in Beijing “want him to be a martyr,” she said, “but we want him home.”

In the Tuesday news conference, she said, “we want to do normal things – go to Mass together,” share meals and read as a family. But because communist officials “don’t understand martyrdom or fidelity to faith,” that’s lost on them, she told me.  

“He has just shown Hong Kong the value of truth,” she said in the news conference, and they do understand how potent that is, so much so that they have to paint him as a national security threat and “this evil man.” 

The specific charges against Lai include a hoked-up commercial lease violation and such dangerous acts as lighting a candle at the annual vigil for those massacred in Tiananmen Square.

The paper he founded was so frightening to the CCP that it was raided twice in 2021, first by 200 police officers and then by 500. Even with its assets and Lai’s frozen, its journalists said they would keep publishing until the ink and paper ran out. On its last night in business, reporters looked out the window and saw supporters lined up around the block to buy a copy.

Sebastien Lai told me three years ago that one man interviewed while in that line was asked, “You’re still buying this? Don’t you know they just got imprisoned?” And the man answered, “I’d buy it if it was a white piece of paper.” The Apple Daily’s last issue sold a million copies.

After Lai called the official who’d ordered the Tiananmen massacre a son-of-a bitch in print, China closed all of Lai’s clothing stores in Beijing. He could either apologize or they’d close him down everywhere. He did not apologize.

Both the conditions in which he’s kept and his own diabetes, high blood pressure, and other ailments are getting worse, Sebastien said, yet he will not be appealing his sentence because to do so would be to perpetuate the false impression that the case, which might as well have been closed before it was ever opened, is still technically ongoing.

“It would just be wasting time my father doesn’t have.” 

Time is also running out for China, even if they don’t yet see that.

Melinda Henneberger is a RealClearPolitics columnist based in Kansas City. She won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and was a Pulitzer finalist for commentary in 2021, for editorial writing in 2020 and for commentary in 2019, all for her work at The Kansas City Star. For 10 years, she was a reporter for The New York Times, based in New York, Washington, D.C., and Rome.