Jimmy Lai may yet outlast Hong Kong’s evil regime
Freedom for Hong Kong: Is it even possible?
It looks grim. Just ask imprisoned freedom supporter Jimmy Lai.
Using COVID as an excuse, the mainland Chinese government rolled in and rolled back legal protections promised to Hong Kongers under the “One country, two systems” agreement that came with an end to British rule.
The Communists banned freedom of assembly, initially as a health measure but with unauthorized assemblies treated as national-security threats.
Unauthorized speech, or speech the government disliked, was punished as well. Like our own government — but much worse — Beijing cracked down on speech it disliked, pretending it was banning foreign misinformation when really it was doing its best to silence the opposition.
Now Jimmy Lai, once a leader of a free-press news outlet in Hong Kong, is instead a political prisoner of the Chinese Communist Party. Lai is 75 years old, but Beijing regards him as a deadly threat.
I certainly hope it’s right.
He’s been through this before. As a new biopic, “The Hong Konger: Jimmy Lai’s Extraordinary Struggle for Freedom,” recounts, his parents were imprisoned during Communist leader Mao Zedong’s terror. Their crime: being too bourgeois.
The state seized the family’s property, and Jimmy, still very young, had to make his living any way he could.
One of his jobs was as a baggage carrier at the train station. After a generous foreigner gave him a chocolate bar when he was starving, he vowed to move to the source of such deliciousness: Hong Kong.
He got a job at a textile factory, became a manager by 28 and invested his money in Hong Kong stocks, earning enough to start his own business and eventually become wealthy: a capitalist success story for an escapee from Communism.
Though he was initially optimistic about China’s post-Mao reforms, by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when Chinese troops killed thousands of peaceful pro-democracy protesters, it became obvious that Communist China was still Communist China.
After Britain negotiated the turnover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, Lai started a Chinese-language pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily.
Under Britain, Hong Kong enjoyed freedom, the rule of law and honest courts. Once the Chinese took over, that changed rapidly. Now it is a lawless place, ruled by government fiat.
Businesses invest there at their own risk, since the courts largely do what the government tells them. Westerners are increasingly wary about visiting, as authorities may arrest anyone who has criticized the Communist government.
Nikolai Wenzel, who spent years in Hong Kong prior to the takeover, writes: “Under the 2020 National Security Law, I run the risk of arrest if I ever set foot again in Hong Kong or China. Though the odds are low, I am not willing to run the risk of arrest, detention without counsel, and three years to life in a Hong Kong prison — or extradition to the mainland — for some of my ‘seditious’ writings on China.”
Neither am I. As I told a staffer at the Chinese embassy immediately after the Tiananmen massacre, China’s government is not legitimate, and that massacre was a crime against humanity.
So was the violation of China’s treaty obligations with regard to Hong Kong, and so is its persecution of Jimmy Lai.
Lai is not without friends. Last week, the European Parliament passed an urgent resolution urging Hong Kong “to immediately and unconditionally release and drop all charges against Jimmy Lai and all other pro-democracy representatives and activists who have exercised their freedom of expression and basic human rights,” with 483 votes in favor, nine against and 42 abstentions.
A bipartisan group of US senators has called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to block a visit by Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee.
United Nations experts,including those in the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, have demanded Lai’s release.
Nor is his support limited to elites. Protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” rose after the government banned it to occupy the top 10 slots on the Hong Kong iTunes charts. Can’t stop the signal, as they say.
When I spoke with Jimmy Lai a few years ago, he told me that the more authorities repress him, the more powerful he becomes.
Now Jimmy Lai is in jail, a jail the Chinese government would extend to the world, if it could.
But many freedom activists have been jailed only to see the corrupt and despotic governments that imprison them fall. May Jimmy Lai be the next such.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
