27 Feb 2025 | Asia and Pacific, Hong Kong, News and features
Jimmy Lai has led many lives. An impoverished factory worker, a garment billionaire, owner of one of Hong Kong’s most influential papers, a born-again Catholic. He’s a man of mythical status; someone who doesn’t know their official birthday, who left Mao’s China spurred on by the taste of chocolate, who once lived in a house with a pet bear, monkey and flying fox. A son, a brother, a husband, a father, a boss, a friend. He is all of the above. But to many today he’s known mostly as a political prisoner, and not just any prisoner – arguably the prisoner the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fears the most.
“The more I was forced to think about Jimmy in a larger historical context, the more convinced I am that there is nobody in the 75 years of CCP rule like Jimmy,” said Mark Clifford, the author of The Troublemaker, a new biography on Lai.
“He’s got three things that make them afraid of him,” Clifford continued. “They are: money, which means he can buy the best lawyers; a megaphone in the form of media; and principles. That may be the hardest of them all to deal with – because they don’t [have principles] right?”
Lai has been in custody since December 2020. In the years leading up to his arrest, he became a constant thorn in China’s side. In stark contrast to other tycoons who rose to the top in Hong Kong, he was one of the fiercest critics of the CCP and a leading figure campaigning for democracy in the former British territory, championing freedoms through his publications, his writings and his on-the-ground activism. This earned him the status of hero to many in Hong Kong, but the CCP branded him a “traitor” who threatened Chinese national security.
I’m chatting with Clifford a week after the launch of his book in London, and a few weeks after it was released in the USA, which is where he has flown in from. A journalist by training, Clifford lived in Hong Kong for decades from the late 1980s, and now leads the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, which campaigns for political prisoners specifically and for the improvement of rights in Hong Kong more generally.
Clifford is the obvious biographer of Lai, having known him since the early 1990s and having also served on the board of Next Digital, Lai’s media company. And it’s clear from Clifford’s book that he’s a big fan of Lai’s. That’s not to say the book is a hagiography. Clifford does recall Lai’s mistakes. He explained that he wanted to show Lai how he was and is, “warts and all”, and this makes the book a valuable addition – it’s a portrait of the man himself, rather than the symbol he has become.
Still, there is no denying, as Clifford told me, that it’s a “portrait of a genuinely heroic person”.
“The Chinese have been battling with him for 30 years. Every other business person has cracked, right? Everybody surrenders,” said Clifford, circling back to Lai’s defining qualities of strength and principle.
Of Clifford’s many memories (which include when Lai cooked for Clifford – an unusually down-to-earth gesture for a man of such wealth – and many trips on Lai’s boat), one of the most vivid is a dinner at Clifford’s own house straight after an infamous column of Lai’s from 1994. In it, he described then Chinese premier Li Peng as a gui dan – turtle egg. Beijing did not take the slight lightly – they closed down Lai’s Beijing store. At dinner, Lai spent the entire evening talking about it, how corrupt the CCP were and how they had to go.
“He was quite defiant. He just felt so passionately,” said Clifford.
It’s easy to point to several moments in Lai’s life and declare them the turning point. The protest movement and crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989 is one, when Lai’s garment factory supplied t-shirts to the protesters. Clifford sees his column in 1994 as another. Lai’s response was to write a follow-up piece in which he apologised for the bad language used in the first while highlighting that he still meant every word.
In The Troublemaker Clifford paints a picture of Lai as an outsider – an immigrant who wasn’t born into money and didn’t always easily fit in with the company he kept – and this was perhaps part of his success.
“It [his background] excluded him, but it also gave him a power, because it meant he could play by his own rules.”
He was always a natural entrepreneur, knowing what and how to sell and as he became more political his ambition became more focused:
“He had a product – democracy – which he wanted people to buy,” said Clifford, talking of Lai’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, which blended high-brow and low-brow content to help the message travel further.
As defiant as Lai might be, he is not unflappable. Clifford remembers a time he saw him break down in tears. Lai was giving a speech ahead of the Hong Kong handover in 1997 and it was then, to Clifford’s own knowledge, that Lai first spoke publicly about his concerns that he could be arrested.
“On the one hand, you’re thinking ‘come on, this can’t really happen’, because it seems so unreal. On the other hand, Jimmy Lai probably has a better sense of what could happen. So he was right. He did get an extra 20-something years of freedom, but, you know, he was right,” Clifford said on reflection.
In 2020 Hong Kong authorities passed the National Security Law. Many of those who had been heavily involved in the protest movement left Hong Kong. Lai did not. He was arrested twice that year and has not seen a day of freedom since.
His national security trial started at the end of 2023. He is now 77 and has diabetes. And yet despite the years in prison – the bulk of which he has spent in solitary confinement – and his poor health, when Clifford has watched him during his court appearances, he remains defiant.
“It seems like he’s giving as good as he’s getting. It’s really remarkable,” he noted.
Lai’s Catholic faith is part of the reason. He believes that no suffering is meaningless and has found refuge in faith. From his cell, he writes letters and sketches illustrations, often drawing on religious symbolism. A few years ago, a series of these were published in our magazine.
Clifford’s book is about Lai, which means it’s ultimately about Hong Kong, a city that Clifford tells me he loved as soon as he saw it. Arriving there in the late 1980s, Clifford was drawn to it as “a place of incredible freedom”. Even though today that freedom has gone, Clifford has not foregone all hope. He holds onto the belief that economic growth ultimately leads to more freedom. “Bread is not enough,” he said in no uncertain terms.
He used the conjunction “when” Lai gets out of prison rather than “if”, and told me how I’ll meet Lai one day and he’ll thank me and everyone who has helped get him out. As for this book, it’s one of Clifford’s many contributions to that effort. Of course the CCP will hate it but, like the book’s protagonist, Clifford has little time for what the CCP thinks.
“If the price of Jimmy getting out is that they pulp the book, that would be fine,” he said.
The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic was published in hardback in the USA in December 2024
22 Nov 2024 | Afghanistan, China, Fellowship 2024, Hong Kong, Iran, News and features, Palestine, Russia, Uganda
Index held its annual awards on Wednesday, the biggest night in its organisational calendar. This year another crop of amazing individuals enter the Index fold and we pledge to do as much as possible to help them fight oppression (whilst not forgetting about our previous winners – we will free Toomaj Salehi).
I want the names of the 2024 winners to become household ones, so allow me to repeat them here – Iranian journalist, Nasim Soltanbeygi; Palestinian human rights lawyer, Diala Ayesh; the Ugandan media outlet, Kuchu Times; Russian “artivist”, Aleksandra Skochilenko; and Evgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of former Russian political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was the powerhouse behind his release. Read more about the winners here.
It was a big week for Index. It was also a big week for Hong Kong. On Tuesday 45 of the pro-democracy activists HongKong47, as they’re known, were sentenced to between four and 10 years in prison. The Hong Kong authorities have tried to present this as justice and the usual Chinese Communist Party (CCP) nationalists came out of the shadows to attack people who claimed otherwise.
My response to these online trolls is that these people simply campaigned – legally and peacefully – to maintain some semblance of democracy and due process in a city once regarded as the most free in Asia. Fortunately, jail has not fully crushed their spirits. Joshua Wong playfully yelled from court as he was escorted away shouting “I love Hong Kong, bye bye”, whilst Tiffany Yuen wore a Liverpool FC top (the team’s anthem is You’ll Never Walk Alone).
With barely a day to process this grim news, Hong Kong media mogul and democracy activist Jimmy Lai was then in court to resume his case. I’ve not met Jimmy, but through a combination of meeting his remarkable son Sebastien, publishing his letters from prison and reading a lot about him, I feel as if I know him by this stage. Keir Starmer raised Jimmy’s case with Xi Jinping on Monday and I hope this signals a change in direction from the UK government, who’ve been far too quiet on this until now. It’s a disgrace that Jimmy has already spent so many years in jail.
I want to end with news that I heard via Fawzia Koofi, who was a prominent female MP in Afghanistan before she fled the country. It has not been reported internationally – school girls in certain areas of Afghanistan are failing year six on purpose because they are barred from attending the next school year. Repeating the same grade is the only way to stay in school.
The situation for girls and women in Afghanistan is so extreme and horrible that many people simply try not to think about it. But we can’t do that. At our Wednesday awards, a top UK journalist spoke to me specifically about what we can do to help in the UK. It’s a question the Index team often asks; we’ve done a lot of work in this area, including publishing journalism from and by Afghan women and pressing the UK government on its visa policy for Afghan journalists. But it’s clear that we need to do more.
Afghan women and girls are the most censored people in the world today. So if you’re in Afghanistan, reading this right now, know this – you’re not forgotten. A group of dedicated, engaged and influential people and organisations really care. Together we will try our hardest to help.
19 Jul 2024 | China, Hong Kong, News and features, Newsletters, Russia
Has China entered a “garbage time of history”? Some netizens think so. According to a Guardian article from yesterday, the term is trending, coined to reflect a generation who feel squeezed by rising costs and other social burdens. Those behind the term even created a “2024 misery ranking grand slam”, which tallies up the number of misery points that a person might have earned this year (one star for unemployment, two stars for a mortgage, another for hoarding the expensive liquor Moutai and so on). I always felt bonded to many of my Chinese friends by what I’d say was a shared sense of humour – the dry, acerbic sort that Brits are famed for, the one that is still able to chortle no matter how bad the news. It’s very much on display in this story.
The censors though aren’t laughing. They’re scrubbing. Pity these people who take away the lemonade from those with lemons.
Two other stories emerged from the region this week that, while not necessarily “garbage”, were bad. The first concerned a rumour that Xi Jinping had a stroke (side note: Xi is 71, his mother is 97, and his father died aged 88). The rumour spread across Chinese social media and was picked up on X by the activist Jennifer Zeng, who has a huge following. It was later debunked, including by the Reuters Fact Check team here. In the interim, China’s censors blocked posts about it.
The story was troubling, and not just the censorship angle. There are perils to getting things wrong when you are meant to be on the side fighting for freedoms, a central one being that it’s an own goal, a way to feed into the autocrats’ line that it is others, not themselves, who can’t be trusted.
Another troubling story this week came out of Hong Kong. On Wednesday Wall Street Journal reporter Selina Cheng was laid off. The Post said it was part of a restructuring. Cheng believes it was linked to her taking up the position of chair at the Hong Kong Journalists Association, a union that campaigns for media freedom. She said she was pressed by her employer not to stand for election for chair, being told the role would be “incompatible with my employment at the Wall Street Journal”. The WSJ have not commented on her firing. But a pattern appears to be emerging of major international outlets being spooked by association with the HKJA. According to an article from the China Media Project, three recently elected members of the HKJA board, alongside an outgoing leader of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, said they faced similar pressures.
“All asked to remain anonymous, fearing reprisals from their employers, but confirmed that the Journal is not alone: the biggest names in Hong Kong and China’s foreign press have been pressuring their employees to stand back and stay quiet, or face the repercussions. For the territory’s embattled journalists, defending the free press has become a fight on two fronts: against both an increasingly authoritarian government and their own employers, based in the West and nominally committed to liberal principles,” the article said.
Meanwhile Tom Grundy from Hong Kong Free Press, one of the few independent media to still operate from Hong Kong, told Index that the news added to the sense of vulnerability felt by journalists there. He said:
“When a giant international news organisation fails to support the city’s only independent media union and its officers, they further erode press freedom by closing precious space. It sends a terrible signal, and makes their own remaining staff more vulnerable in the long run. Especially locals.”
The Beijing supporting media of course is loving it. The Global Times tabloid was calling the press union “a malignant tumour that harms the city’s safety and security”.
Finally on the note of the WSJ, we have just heard news that the reporter Evan Gershkovich has been sentenced to 16 years in a Russian prison on espionage charges after he was arrested last March while on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg 1,600 km east of Moscow. That this news was predicable doesn’t make it any less disturbing. We will continue to fight for his release.
18 Jul 2023
Register your support for Jimmy Lai, the jailed publisher of Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, by sending a postcard message
