9 Feb 2026 | Asia and Pacific, China, Hong Kong, News
Today we woke up to the news that Jimmy Lai had been sentenced to 20 years in prison in his National Security case. Lai is 78 years old and has deteriorating health. It’s unlikely he will ever set foot outside the prison gates again.
We are appalled by the flagrant disregard for all due process in this case, and indeed the very premise of the case. The National Security Law, passed in 2020, was never about security and always about control, and this case was never about following the law and always about making an example of Lai – a pro-democracy activist and founder of now defunct Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily News – to scare everyone else into silence. If there was any residual hope that the city of Hong Kong still cared about justice and freedom this case has put paid to that.
We are heartbroken for Lai and his family. Since Lai’s arrest in 2020 we’ve come to know his son Sebastien, and are full of admiration for his resolve. It’s something we’ve also seen amongst his siblings and Lai’s wife Teresa. In 2022 we were proud to publish letters written by Lai from prison. The letters revealed that Lai – a devout Catholic – had managed to find comfort through his faith. We hope that his faith can still provide that, and our thoughts are with his family today.
We are fearful that Lai could be transferred to a prison in China itself, where the conditions could be that much worse and where contact with his family, legal counsel and the outside world would be much harder. Though it should be noted that the conditions in Hong Kong prisons have been deteriorating rapidly and Lai remains in solitary confinement.
We are disappointed by the British government, who could and should have pushed much harder on Lai’s release. From where we stand, Lai – a British citizen – has always felt like an afterthought, someone to be discussed quickly to say he had been raised, without a real thirst to change his outcome. In the wake of his sentencing, an expansion of the British National (Overseas) visa scheme has just been announced. This is a welcome move. However, it does nothing to get Lai out of jail.
Lai was not the only one sentenced. While their terms are shorter, eight others, most from Lai’s media company Apple Daily, will still spend many years in jail. It’s important to remember them too. They are Ryan Law, Lam Man-chung, Fung Wai-kong, Yeung Ching-kee, Chan Pui-man, Cheung Kim-hung, Andy Li and Chan Tsz-wah. Several testified against Lai in exchange for shorter sentences, and it’s believed they did so following extreme coercion.
The only positive is this: outside the court room, amid a heavy police presence, people still turned up to show their support for Lai and the Apple Daily team. One person even apparently carried an Apple Daily keychain, and was detained. We stand by these people who display extraordinary bravery. Like Lai, they are willing to risk their freedom to fight for what’s right and fair. The Hong Kong authorities have gone out of their way to crush dissent but they have not yet fully succeeded.
And finally, we stand by Jimmy Lai. The battle to secure freedom for this brave, principled man does not end today.
15 Dec 2025 | Hong Kong, News, Statements
We at Index on Censorship condemn today’s guilty verdict coming out of Hong Kong in the “trial” of democracy activist and media mogul Jimmy Lai. Nothing about this trial has been free or fair. Indeed the National Security Law itself, which Lai has been charged under, is an affront to free speech, masquerading as justice when instead its sole purpose is to criminalise and crush opposition voices.
Lai has been imprisoned in Hong Kong since 2020. He has already been sentenced for separate charges of unauthorised assembly and fraud, but the National Security Law charge he has now been convicted of was the most serious accusation. As a result of today’s verdict Lai, who is 78 years old and a British citizen, could face life in prison.
Lai has a long history of being an advocate for free speech and democracy. He describes himself as having a “rebellious nature”, which he has demonstrated throughout his life. Born in mainland China in 1947 during the Chinese Civil War, when he was just 12 years old Lai smuggled himself into Hong Kong as a stowaway on a fishing boat. He launched a very successful career in the city through his role at a garment factory, and later his clothing line, before being inspired to go into the media business in the 1990s by his outrage at the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Lai founded the media company that went on to become Next Digital in 1990. It grew to include Apple Daily, a popular opposition newspaper dedicated to free speech, in 1995. After the Hong Kong handover in 1997, Apple Daily became known for challenging Beijing’s party line, as did Lai, who emerged as a key figure in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp, which emerged in response to the increasing attacks on freedoms in the region.
Since the ascension of Xi Jinping to power from 2012, the CCP ‘s crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong only intensified. Then on 30 June 2020, the National Security Law was passed. Speaking before its passage, Lai called the law “a death knell for Hong Kong”. Lai was arrested on 10 August of that year, as were others from Next Digital.
Following his arrest, Apple Daily was also targeted. The newspaper was forced to shut down a year later when its assets were frozen.
Index has campaigned on behalf of Lai since his arrest. We have covered updates on his situation, published letters of Lai’s written from prison and launched A Postcard for Jimmy, a campaign encouraging people to write a brief message of support to Lai in order to boost his morale and let him know he has not been forgotten.
Throughout his ordeal, Jimmy Lai – whose health has visibly deteriorated – has never backed down from his pro-democracy position. Preferring to be a martyr for the cause rather than sacrifice his principles, Lai is being punished for exercising his right to free speech. It is vital that his case does not go unnoticed. The guilty verdict returned in relation to these charges is an appalling breach of Lai’s personal rights and freedoms, and we will continue to condemn the decision while Lai continues to be incarcerated. Advocating for human rights is not a crime. Keeping Jimmy Lai locked up is.
2 Sep 2025 | About Index, Asia and Pacific, China, Hong Kong, News, Newsletters
The Jimmy Lai trial wrapped up last week, without a verdict. When this will come is anyone’s guess. One of the three judges, Esther Toh, said it would be announced “in good time”.
For a man who has been wrongly imprisoned for more than 1,700 days, is in his late 70s, and has serious health conditions, “in good time” is gratingly noncommittal. Of course it’s likely intentional, a way to further punish him and his family. But there’s more to it. When it comes to Lai language has always been used to obfuscate, frustrate and discredit. Hong Kong authorities, the CCP and their allies frequently twist words, calling him and his supporters traitors and other slurs. They can be bold in their denigrations – and they can be seemingly subtle.
“I’ve lost count of the number of times the Chinese / Hong Kong authorities or CCP State media have called me a “so-called human rights lawyer” leading a “so-called legal team.”,” said one of Lai’s lawyers, Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, this week on X. Gallagher made this comment following the release of a new report, titled “The Use of ‘So-called’ as a Propaganda Device in China”. By academics Linette Lim and Alexander Dukalsis (the latter an Index contributor), it looks at how China’s state-run media increasingly use inverted commas and the words so-called when talking about an idea or person that they wish to discredit.
It’s not a new trend nor is it unique to China, as the authors note (Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used these linguistic tools too). Still, it’s growing in use there. Articles on Taiwan and Hong Kong will typically employ such language, as do ones on the USA. In fact the authors were struck by how many articles tried to delegitimise the USA and believe it’s “partly in response to more hawkish US policy towards China in recent years and partly accelerated by Xi Jinping’s increased domestic control and repression”.
The report is a helpful addition when considering how information is controlled under Xi Jinping, as was James Palmer’s piece in Foreign Policy last week labelled “A guide to Censorship in China”, which was based on his many years living and working there. In it Palmer describes the censorship machine as “messy”. While people can cover most sensitive topics in China, and Palmer says it’s relatively uncommon for authorities to outright refuse to publish something, the process is unpredictable, exhausting, artistically damaging and at times high stakes, putting many off. “In better times, publishers are willing to take risks, but those better times are a long way away,” wrote Palmer.
Better times do sadly feel very distant, though I’d imagine if pressed the CCP would say they’ll arrive “in good time”.
27 Feb 2025 | Asia and Pacific, Hong Kong, News
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
