Jimmy Lai must come home

As Keir Starmer leaves today for Beijing, 78-year-old Jimmy Lai will be in a small windowless cell in Hong Kong, where he has spent 23 hours a day for more than five years. Lai is a British citizen, yet no British official has paid him a visit. The UK prime minister’s China trip provides an opportunity to right this wrong, and to bring Jimmy home.

I have known Jimmy for more than three decades. His story is remarkable. He fetched up on Hong Kong’s shores as a penniless 12-year-old, escaping a famine in China that killed as many as 45million people. On his first night in the then British colony, he slept in a factory. Fifteen years later, he owned one. He pocketed his first million pounds making sweaters and then many millions more by setting up the trend-setting Giordano chain of fast-fashion clothing stores.

The 1989 Tiananmen Square killings prompted Lai to branch out from the rag trade to the media. In 1990, he started a magazine and, in 1995, a newspaper, believing that a free press would hasten the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The presses started rolling for Apple Daily, a colourful, irreverent, free-market, free-speech paper in June 1995. Coming two years before Britain turned Hong Kong over to Chinese rule, one could doubt Lai’s sanity but not his courage.

China promised that Hong Kongers would run Hong Kong after Britain left. Beijing vowed that all the freedoms of the late colonial era would be protected – and then some. Beijing promised a path to universal suffrage and full local democracy.

Lai was brave enough to take China at its word. For three decades, his publications channelled the hopes and dreams of the Hong Kong people. He expanded his operations to Taiwan after the democratic transition there at the turn of the century. In less than two decades, Lai had established the largest and most influential Chinese-language media operation in the world.

Lai supported the student-led Occupy movement in 2014, pitching a tent outside Hong Kong government headquarters during the 79-day protest against Beijing’s refusal to allow non CCP-vetted candidates to run in the city’s council elections. He was arrested at the end of the sit-in. Still, he pressed on. Apple Daily acted as a bullhorn during the 2019 protests in which millions of Hong Kongers went out on the street, demanding their promised democracy. It was one of the most serious threats to continued Communist rule since Mao took power in 1949.

Young activists sometimes derided Lai and others of his generation for being too willing to work within the system. Lai’s principled belief in non-violence, stemming from his conversion to Catholicism in 1997, also struck some as unrealistic. Squeezed by militants on one side and signs of an impending government crackdown on the other, Lai could have left. He stayed because he believed in Hong Kong, and believed in fighting for freedom in a city that ‘gave me everything’.

So Lai was target No1 for the hard men in Beijing when they imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong in 2020. He was rich, with a strong international network, so they worried that he had the resources to become an alternate source of power. He ran a newspaper and magazine, and could influence public opinion – an intolerable proposition for a Communist regime that thinks that the media should serve up propaganda for the state. He is a man of deep principle, fearless and unafraid to stand up for what’s right.

Arrested in August 2020, then briefly released on bail, Lai has been in jail since 31 December 2020 – that’s 1,855 days as of today. He has served time for made-up crimes ranging from lighting a candle (‘incitement to riot’) to taking part in a march along with some two million others (‘unauthorised assembly’) and subletting a small corner of the newspaper’s headquarters (‘fraud’). He served 14 months for the first two offences and is in the midst of a five-year and nine-month sentence for the office sublet.

Then, after a two-year trial in December, a panel of hand-picked judges predictably found Lai guilty for ‘collusion with foreign forces’ under the National Security Law. The ‘collusion’ consisted of meeting British and American politicians. He is now awaiting sentencing, likely a minimum of 15 years, effectively a death sentence for an aging man in deteriorating health held in solitary confinement.

Lai never fancied himself a political leader. He had no aspirations to be a Navalny or a Mandela. A primary school dropout, he simply wanted to do his part for freedom – freedom that, he always reminded listeners, he learned under British rule. He always talked about ‘Western values’, by which he meant the rule of law. He stayed in Hong Kong despite knowing that he risked imprisonment. He stayed because he knew that he had done nothing wrong.

I hope that Starmer uses his time in Beijing to push for his release. Last week, the PM gifted China permission to have its new mega-embassy in the old Royal Mint, next to the Tower of London, as part of his desire for a new ‘golden era’ in Sino-British relations. For Chinese leader Xi Jinping, freeing Lai would cost nothing and remove a major irritant in relations.

Born in China, coming of age in colonial Hong Kong, Lai has been a British citizen for more than three decades. He exemplifies what is best about British values of freedom and fair play. It’s time to bring Jimmy home.

Mark L Clifford is the author of The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident and China’s Most Feared Critic, and is the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.