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HONG KONG—When Beijing imposed the national-security legislation on Hong Kong in 2020, its aim was not merely to stifle free expression and lock up dissenters. The thought was to subordinate each establishment within the metropolis, leaving the “one country, two systems” framework that granted autonomy to the Chinese territory an empty slogan. Henceforth Beijing would not tolerate criticism from Hong Kong, or protests on its streets.
With the prodemocracy motion of 2019–20 successfully crushed, the Hong Kong authorities and officers in Beijing have discovered extra makes use of for the legislation: to settle outdated scores and rewrite historical past. By prosecuting a comparatively small variety of high-profile instances below the national-security legislation, the authorities are portraying the motion not as a well-liked rebellion however as a traitorous conspiracy of troublemakers in league with overseas powers. Any plot wants a ringleader, and the authorities consider they’ve one to suit their narrative: the media tycoon Jimmy Lai.
In this telling, Lai has been elevated to an omniscient actor—a puppeteer of the unwilling lots who for years used his wealth and publications (notably Apple Daily newspaper), with help from the United Kingdom and United States, to dupe town’s residents into doing his nefarious bidding. Lai and his newspaper loom giant in essentially the most consequential national-security-law instances going to trial. Reams of prosecutorial paperwork painting him as a scheming “mastermind.” A supply shut to at least one trial involving Lai informed me that Hong Kong’s national-security officers press suspects on their hyperlinks to his enterprise, cobbling the suspects’ solutions collectively to suit a predetermined narrative.
“The police are making the story of Jimmy Lai,” this individual, who requested to not be named for worry of police retaliation, informed me. The decentralized nature of the 2019 motion remains to be considered with paranoid disbelief by those that opposed it. The authorities “don’t believe that everything came from the ground up,” as a result of they suppose “that is impossible.”
Already, in December, Lai was sentenced to greater than 5 years in jail—a punishment, ensuing from a case involving violations of a lease settlement, that one Hong Kong lawyer described to me as “shocking” in its severity. This harsh new sentence builds on lesser ones that Lai was already serving for participation in peaceable protests, but Lai’s most daunting authorized troubles are nonetheless forward. He will go on trial once more this yr, this time explicitly for violating the national-security legislation; the accusation of being a chief instigator makes his essentially the most severe of the handfuls of individuals presently charged below the legislation. Lai’s case has been delayed because the Hong Kong authorities works furiously to forbid him from being represented by a British lawyer. In November, Hong Kong’s chief government, John Lee, requested Beijing to intervene within the matter after town’s courts dominated towards the federal government’s repeated efforts to drive Lai to alter legal professionals. Shortly earlier than the top of the yr, China’s high legislative physique decreed that Hong Kong’s chief government has the ability to override the court docket’s choice.
A conviction for Lai could be a tidy conclusion to Beijing’s blatant train in rewriting historical past. Much as China’s leaders succeeded in recasting the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, their narrative in regards to the 2019 prodemocracy protests will strip company from the a whole lot of 1000’s of Hong Kongers who took half in them. The revisionist historical past will even absolve the authorities themselves, in each Beijing and Hong Kong, of their quite a few failures of governance. Hong Kong’s courts, as soon as lauded for his or her adherence to frequent legislation and judicial independence, might be pressed into serving this narrative.
Lai has a narrative of his personal, a private mythology he has recited numerous instances for reporters and rapt audiences. After his well-to-do household was stripped of its wealth when Mao Zedong got here to energy, Lai began his working life earlier than he even reached his teenagers, carrying passengers’ baggage at a railway station in mainland China. One day, a person whom Lai had helped along with his baggage took a chocolate bar out of his pocket and handed it to Lai. When Lai requested the person the place he had gotten such a scrumptious deal with, the person stated “Hong Kong.” The metropolis “must be heaven, because I’ve never tasted anything like that,” Lai recounted in The Hong Konger: Jimmy Lai’s Extraordinary Struggle for Freedom, a hagiographical documentary launched in 2022. Making it to town turned his mission.
The younger Lai arrived in Hong Kong just a few years later as a 12-year-old stowaway on a fishing boat. He labored his method up from being a toddler laborer in a garment manufacturing unit to changing into a salesman, jetting between Hong Kong and New York City, the place he hustled clothes samples by day and partied till daybreak at Manhattan nightclubs. On one journey, as Lai has usually informed, a lawyer he was eating with gave him a replica of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Lai credited the e-book with altering his life, inspiring him to turn into an entrepreneur free of the shackles of the state.
In 1981, he launched his personal clothes model. He referred to as it Giordano—by his account, after a pizza parlor he wandered into one night time in New York in search of a treatment for the munchies after utilizing marijuana. The Hong Kong–based mostly firm quickly flourished by promoting informal put on in fast-growing shopper markets throughout Asia.
Lai, nevertheless, was not content material merely to turn into a multimillionaire. In 1989, as protests gathered momentum in China, he donated tens of 1000’s of {dollars} to the coed demonstrators who gathered in Tiananmen Square, and he had T-shirts printed that bore photos of the coed leaders’ faces. After the Chinese authorities crushed the motion, Lai determined he wanted a extra formal platform for his message and ventured into journalism. He began Next journal, a weekly publication, after which Apple Daily. The title was an allusion to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and the tree of data. “An apple a day keeps the liars away,” an early slogan proclaimed.
The entrepreneur’s outspoken criticism of the Chinese Communist Party made him an anomaly among the many metropolis’s enterprise elites. “For Hong Kong’s big business leaders, especially those with interests in the colony that extend beyond 1997, allying with Beijing is simply good business,” a reporter on the International Herald Tribune famous in a 1991 article that highlighted Lai and his “unusual” place within the former British colony that was as a consequence of be handed again to China. But a part of Giordano’s mother or father firm was owned by a Chinese state-controlled enterprise, and Lai stated he had no issues with interference from the mainland.
The congeniality didn’t final. After Lai wrote a mocking assault on Chinese Premier Li Peng in a 1994 concern of Next, Giordano’s shops on the mainland confronted bureaucratic harassment that continued even after Lai resigned from the corporate’s board and bought the rest of his stake to focus as an alternative on his media empire. With his publishing ventures, he had, he stated, entered the enterprise of delivering “information, which is choice and choice is freedom.”
Lai’s model of freedom in his publications concerned an eclectic, usually sensationalist combine: Columns from main prodemocracy advocates and political investigations ran alongside tales of intercourse scandals and movie star gossip. Sometimes, Apple Daily breached journalistic boundaries and have become the story itself. In 1998, the paper was obliged to print a front-page apology for its unethical and salacious protection of a household murder-suicide. On one other event, a workers reporter was arrested after he was found to have been paying law enforcement officials for info.
Despite these missteps and setbacks, Lai was undaunted. He refused to be cowed by threats—both from the authorities or from Hong Kong’s elite. He tangled with town’s tycoons, whom he accused of pulling ads from the paper when he made an ill-fated foray into e-commerce. His residence and workplace had been firebombed on multiple event. Challenged by his personal reporters, throughout a customary yearly interview, about rumors that he had slept with prostitutes earlier than he married (for a second time) in 1991, Lai confirmed the tales, prompting protection by the International Herald Tribune.
His vocal assist of democracy and his protection of a free press gave Lai worldwide media stature, and made him somebody sought out for snappy quotes. The latitude his publications loved turned a bellwether for the freedoms that had been meant to be preserved in Hong Kong below the settlement concluded within the run-up to the 1997 handover. “We are afraid, but we don’t want to be intimidated by fear or blinded by pessimism,” Apple Daily had declared in its first version. For the subsequent twenty years, Apple Daily carved out an enviable place in Hong Kong’s bare-knuckle newspaper enterprise, changing into one of many metropolis’s hottest and trusted information sources.
Lai turned a selected darling of the American proper, which had lengthy heralded Hong Kong as a pro-business utopia of low taxes and restricted welfare the place bootstrapping immigrants from the mainland might prosper—simply as Lai had. William McGurn, a journalist and later a speechwriter for George W. Bush, turned Lai’s godfather when Lai transformed to Catholicism in 1997, shortly earlier than the handover. John Bolton, who labored in quite a few Republican administrations and served as a nationwide safety adviser to President Donald Trump, first met Lai in Hong Kong within the late Nineties. “I was incredibly impressed by Jimmy,” Bolton informed me. He “really had a vision for what Hong Kong could be and what kind of society he wanted in Hong Kong.”
Lai additionally turned mates with the libertarian economist Milton Friedman and accompanied him to China. A vocal proponent of free-market capitalism himself, Lai argued that the U.S. had for too lengthy tried to work with China, reasonably than confront the nation and its management. “You in the West need to have confidence in the superiority of your own system,” he stated, when delivering a speech on the Hoover Institution in 2019. “China is never embarrassed to assert its own values even though these values are rooted in perhaps the most horrible Western export, Marxism. America needs to have the same confidence in its values and its own moral authority.”
This inconceivable run as an avatar of press freedom lasted till the morning of August 10, 2020, when greater than 100 law enforcement officials raided the headquarters of Apple Daily. Lai was escorted via the newsroom in handcuffs after being arrested. Despite the raid, the newspaper continued to publish for almost a yr. But police returned in June 2021, and the newspaper’s financial institution accounts had been frozen. The ultimate version of Apple Daily appeared on June 24.
Hong Okayong’s prodemocracy political events and activists, although usually lumped collectively, span a spectrum of political leanings. And regardless of doling out cash to completely different prodemocracy teams—donations revealed in 2014 when a whole lot of his monetary information had been leaked—Lai was not universally beloved. Some felt that he was too near town’s outdated guard of moderates, whom youthful generations believed had little to indicate after many years of pushing for incremental change, notably after the Umbrella Movement limped to an finish in 2014. Apple Daily was generally criticized for racist and sexist protection, notably from its extra spirited columnists.
In 2019, when tens of millions took to the streets and protesters sought worldwide assist, outstanding activists and prodemocracy lawmakers turned to Washington. Lai capitalized on his Republican connections and had a sequence of conferences with Bolton, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Bolton informed me that Trump cared little about Hong Kong, aside from being briefly impressed by the dimensions of protests—town “had joined Taiwan on the list of minor irritants he didn’t want getting in the way of his relationship with Xi Jinping,” Bolton stated. Still, these senior Trump officers regarded assembly Lai as vital as a result of it confirmed that “America as a whole was strongly supportive of what the Hong Kongers wanted to do.”
Back at residence, although, press protection of the conferences enraged the Hong Kong authorities. Chinese state-backed media denounced Lai as a traitor who had betrayed the nation in favor of American pursuits.
At the identical time, Lai confronted criticism from activists within the prodemocracy camp. Despite his assist for the protests, he was attacked for not backing extra radical actions towards police misconduct. Tam Tak-chi, a prodemocracy activist with the People Power celebration, who pleaded responsible to a national-security offense after collaborating in an unofficial major vote in 2020, was one who noticed Lai as too conservative. During a current interview from jail, the place he’s serving a 40-month sentence for sedition, Tam informed me Lai was “not as progressive” as his personal celebration.
Nevertheless, Lai’s actions would quickly land him in hassle with the Hong Kong authorities. In 2019, Lai began serving to a pair of prodemocracy activists, certainly one of whom was an ungainly IT employee from Hong Kong named Andy Li. Li had thrown himself into the 2019 motion and have become a key member of a bunch that aimed to lift consciousness of the protests overseas by buying newspaper adverts. After the success of the marketing campaign and an inflow of donations, the group, Stand With Hong Kong, expanded into lobbying and assembly with foreign-government officers. Li, in accordance with individuals who know him, had a robotic work ethic, seemingly capable of grind for days with out sleep. A lawyer who represents him declined my request for remark.
In August 2020, Li was arrested for violating the national-security legislation on a cost of conspiring to collude with overseas forces. Less than two weeks after his arrest, whereas out on police bail, Li tried to flee to Taiwan by boat however was apprehended, together with 11 others. According to 2 folks with information of his case, Li flipped and agreed to cooperate with officers in constructing a case towards Lai.
In August 2021, Li pleaded responsible, as did his co-defendant, Chan Tsz-wah, a paralegal. Police investigating the 2 had an virtually obsessive deal with Lai and the U.S. authorities, in accordance with one of many two folks I talked with who had been accustomed to the investigation. Documents within the case underscore the purpose: The bulk of the 30-page abstract of information submitted to the court docket focuses totally on Lai. The prosecutors paint him because the “mastermind” of a fundraising-and-lobbying effort that, in actuality, was largely a crowdsourced enterprise by activists that started on a well-liked message board.
The court docket paperwork additionally virtually solely blame Lai for pushing the U.S. authorities to cross laws aimed toward punishing Hong Kong for its lack of autonomy from the mainland, and later to sanction authorities officers each within the metropolis and in Beijing. The Hong Kong authorities described Lai in court docket paperwork as representing “the highest level of the syndicate”—as if he had been a triad boss.
Although Lai was concerned in Stand With Hong Kong, to painting him as its architect grossly inflates his position, in accordance with the individual with shut information of certainly one of Lai’s trials. “They have to have someone who admits to being the mastermind,” this individual informed me. “Jimmy stood out for them: He said a lot of things, he has money,” so, within the eyes of the federal government, “he has to take the responsibility for the whole movement.”
Lai’s affect on current U.S. coverage making can also be exaggerated. Trump, for all his anti-China bluster, was unconcerned with human rights and primarily fascinated with signing a commerce cope with China. A extra forceful bipartisan response to the state of affairs in Hong Kong got here solely after Beijing imposed the national-security legislation—however even then, Washington held again on the harsher measures advocated by some throughout the administration. A plan to assist Hong Kongers resettle within the U.S. was scuttled by Republican Senator Ted Cruz in December 2020. A short lived order enacted by President Joe Biden to allow prolonged stays within the U.S. for Hong Kong residents is ready to run out subsequent month. Whatever affect Lai had over any of that is in all probability negligible.
Lai can also be on the middle of a court docket case towards six former Apple Daily workers members, who pleaded responsible below the national-security legislation in November to fees of conspiracy to collude with overseas forces. In court docket paperwork, prosecutors construe routine editorial conferences and banal newsroom choices as conspiratorial intent—together with materials revealed by the newspaper that prosecutors declare was masquerading as information however was actually calling for protests or violence. Again, Lai is portrayed because the ringleader of a plot to elicit overseas interference that will “impose sanctions or blockade, or engage in other hostile activities against” China and Hong Kong. That prosecutors will name for Lai to obtain the utmost penalty, a life sentence, appears a close to certainty.
What drives the authorities’ fixation on Jimmy Lai, reasonably than every other prodemocracy determine, is a query that prompts a variety of solutions. Other candidates for ringleaders and such harsh punishment definitely exist. Joshua Wong, who rose to prominence as a teenage protest chief, has a bigger international attain and better identify recognition than Lai. Martin Lee, the genial “godfather of Hong Kong democracy,” was a daily determine in Washington lengthy earlier than Lai, twice assembly with President Bill Clinton within the late Nineties and early 2000s. In Hong Kong itself, different activists who vaulted to prominence in the course of the protests are much more fashionable than Lai.
Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the writer of a number of books on Hong Kong, informed me one principle of the obsession. Beijing understands, he stated, “that logistics is key to eventual success in any competition,” and that chopping off Lai’s capability to offer assist to prodemocracy teams was extra urgent than silencing politicians shouting slogans. Another principle he provided was that the persecution was merely a scare tactic. “By treating Lai harshly,” Tsang informed me, “the party will be able to send a clear and powerful signal to dissidents in Hong Kong that none of them can be safe, if all the money and overseas profile Lai has cannot protect him.”
When I lately interviewed C. Y. Leung, Hong Kong’s acerbic former chief government, for an additional undertaking, he angrily insisted on steering the dialog again to his personal expansive and detailed model of the Lai conspiracy. Leung has turn into extraordinarily jingoistic of late and spoke of Lai with the seething anger of a QAnon follower.
According to Leung, Lai has been covertly working with the British authorities ever since 1997 to separate Hong Kong from China. To obtain this, Lai bankrolled town’s prodemocracy camp to foment a pro-independence revolt. “He had all the leading opposition politicians in his pocket,” he informed me, “and through them he mobilized people and he had his propaganda machinery.”
When I requested Leung to offer proof of his claims, he informed me that this could be like asking the CIA to unveil its secrets and techniques. “Of course I can’t,” he stated. Pressed on why, throughout his 5 years as chief government, he didn’t transfer to place an finish to Lai’s schemes, Leung responded, “We have to have a legal basis, whatever we do.” In different phrases, none of Lai’s political actions had been unlawful earlier than the national-security legislation handed.
But with that in place, Beijing has weaponized the courts towards its longtime adversaries—simply as Chinese state media continues to advertise Lai because the poster boy of the whole lot nefarious in Hong Kong. For each functions, Lai has a sufficiently excessive profile and is convincingly wealthy sufficient to have fomented a subversive rebellion; and, amid the nationalist environment that prevails in Beijing, Lai additionally had extremely suspect overseas connections that reached near the middle of energy in Washington, notably in the course of the Trump administration.
By turning to its outdated playbook of assigning blame to a hostile drive at residence backed by assist from overseas, the Chinese Communist Party is falling right into a entice of its personal creation. Given the sentences that Lai is more likely to obtain for his alleged crimes, Lai might very properly be imprisoned for the remainder of his life. In in search of a scapegoat, Beijing could discover it has created a martyr.