What’s Next for Jimmy Lai?

In deteriorating health and 78 years old, Jimmy Lai is not likely to survive the 20-year prison sentence that Hong Kong’s kangaroo court handed him on Jan. 9. The Chinese Communist Party has ensured that the voice of this prominent media mogul and ardent defender of democracy will never be publicly heard from again, on anything. It accomplished this by distorting the territory’s formerly celebrated judicial system and rule of law. Over a thousand democracy defenders have been imprisoned since Hong Kong’s draconian national security law was imposed in 2020 and, as a mark of Lai’s heroic leadership, his arrest came in its first month and his sentence is the longest.

Lai’s case is a cruel lesson in the futility of dissent under Chinese Communist Party rule that will not be lost on the rest of China’s population. It is an intimidation tactic for them. If one of Hong Kong’s most prominent entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and civic figures can be put away effectively for life merely for standing up for the territory’s renowned tradition of freedom, no Chinese dissent, no deviation from party dictates and Xi Jinping thought will be tolerated. There are no exceptions even for that cosmopolitan, international financial hub that historically had a “separate system.” All 1.4 billion Chinese, including Hong Kongers, must now speak with one voice on politics, history, religion, economics, military force, foreign affairs, and numerous other topics. From academia, the media, and religious pulpits to the Internet and AI, all persons and institutions engaged in public expression must conform. All, in effect, are members of the CCP’s United Front Work Department.

Lai’s daughter Claire told me that the family hopes he will be granted leniency that would result in his release to the United Kingdom, where he has dual citizenship and maintains a home. This, they know, is a long shot. The CCP views unquestioning submission to the party, not mercy, as a virtue. It went to considerable trouble over the past six years since his arrest to maintain the charade that Lai, a civilian with no armed divisions under him, is the island’s most  dangerous prisoner. They took him to and from the courtroom in shackles, in an armored van with a police motorcade, along a route fortified with strategically placed police snipers and security lines and barricades. They kept him in solitary confinement with no other prisoners in his cell block. They are not likely to back down now, even if Lai decides to appeal.

Yet there may be a path forward in diplomacy. There are recent precedents of China reprieving prisoners of conscience with foreign passports in transactional deals with their governments. The release of a Chinese American Christian pastor David Lin is a case in point. Sentenced to life in prison on bogus charges of fraud after involvement with an unregistered house church, Lin’s sentence was commuted several times. After a U.S. prisoner exchange arranged by the Biden administration, and 18 years of imprisonment, Beijing freed Lin and allowed him to leave China for the United States.

Other prisoners with dual citizenship, such as Kai Li, a Chinese American businessman, have also benefited from this “hostage diplomacy.” China arrested Li on national security grounds and accused him of spying in 2016. It released him in a prisoner swap with Washington in 2024. 

That Lai is now China’s most famous prisoner of conscience, by itself, will likely have little impact on his case. Liu Xiaobo, the first and only Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was, like Lai, convicted in 2009 of “subversion” for opposing one-party rule. The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” He was finally released in 2017, three years before his 11-year sentence ended, but only to be transferred to a hospital where he died of liver cancer two weeks later.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Xi Jinping last month and forged a “reset” in trade and investment relations with China. A test of the renewed ties will be whether he is willing and able to make a deal for the release of British citizen Lai. President Trump, who plans to hold a summit with Xi in Beijing in April, should also act since Lai is, like Americans, a son of freedom. Many Soviet bloc prisoners of conscience were released thanks to President Reagan’s personal appeals.

Meanwhile, Lai hangs on through his deep Catholic faith. In a poignant symbol of support, the bent figure of 94-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong who baptized Lai thirty years ago and was once himself a prominent dissenting voice against the CCP, could be seen next to  Lai’s wife Theresa at the sentencing last Monday.

Claire relates that her father treats his imprisonment as a kind of spiritual retreat. She writes:

In prison, my father wakes up in the middle of the night every night to pray. Before the crack of dawn, he wakes up to read the Gospel by leaning against his cell door to catch light from the corridor. … He has said that doing so is like “touching the cloak of Christ” and that it ensures that “life is full, peaceful, and meaningful.”