Jimmy Lai is an extraordinary individual. He is also in prison and on trial for opposing the Chinese government’s oppression of its citizens. He is seventy-six years old and may spend the remainder of his life in prison.
On January 16, former Vice President Mike Pence called for Lai’s release. He said that there is “no more compelling gesture” of goodwill China could take than if it “were to take steps to free Jimmy Lai.” In 2019, Lai had traveled to Washington, DC, to seek support for Hong Kong’s eroding democracy. He met with Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other officials and congressmen. Biographer Mark Clifford reports, “Pence remembers the forty-five-minute meeting as ‘one of the most profound encounters I had in my West Wing office in my four years as vice-president.’’’
The website “Support Jimmy Lai” provides running updates on Lai’s interminable trial; Lai’s defense is costing him millions of dollars. China is dragging the trial out as long as possible, undoubtedly hoping it will outlive the attention span of the rest of the world. At this point, what little remains of Chinese democracy is on the ropes.
Lai merits a place in the twentieth-century pantheon of prisoners of conscience. Clifford explains that Lai is an anticommunist in the mold of John Paul II, who contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. He is not, however, an intellectual heavyweight like China’s Liu Xiaobo, the Soviet Union’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Poland’s Adam Michnik.
He has no aspirations for political office like South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Poland’s Lech Wałęsa, or Russia’s Alexei Navalny, but he is similar to Navalny in that he chose to remain in his own country rather than live safely in exile. Lai, like Navalny, believes he would contradict himself if he left the country in which he fights for freedom in order to safely enjoy liberty somewhere else. Lai also believes he is most effective if he stays in China, even if it means spending the remainder of his days incarcerated. He is not an activist but a businessman. Nor is he a large personality: most find him quiet, even shy. Clifford reports that Lai did not speak until he was three-and-a-half years old—his family feared until then that he was mute.
“I will fight for freedom, I will not give up anticommunism, I will never give up my dignity as a human being, never will.”
Lai merits comparison even with Socrates, who was condemned to death by an Athenian jury for refusing to stop his philosophical quest to discover the best life, both for the individual and for the city. In Plato’s Crito, Socrates declines his friends’ offer to help him escape, claiming that if he did, he would live a lie. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates also explains that he would be untrue to his own children if he declined to seek truth. Lai has expressed the same concern that he would not only let his country down but his four children as well if he were to flee the consequences of his actions, however unjust those penalties might be.
Lai’s political philosophy leans toward libertarianism. Over the years he has given away countless copies of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. He believes, moreover, that political freedom and economic freedom go hand in hand. Lai’s life seems to play that out; the more he supported political protest, the more the Chinese government restricted his enormously successful businesses, ultimately freezing his accounts and forcing his companies to shut down.
He explained his position in one of his frequent editorial columns:
Yes, I am anti-communist. I am completely opposed to the Communist Party because I hate all things that restrict personal freedom. The basis of communist ideology is the absolute restraint of individual freedom. . . . I will fight for freedom, I will not give up anticommunism, I will never give up my dignity as a human being, never will.
China’s president Xi Jinping has restricted freedom and punished speech more severely with each passing year. One even suspects that the real reason Xi refuses to relinquish his ongoing threat to reabsorb Taiwan into mainland China is not so much because of their shared history or ethnicity, but because a free Taiwan is an implicit condemnation of China’s ever-growing authoritarianism.
Commercial Genius, Political Gadfly
In 1949, Mao Zedong’s forces defeated the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek. Those who could fled to the nearby island of Taiwan as Mao began his horrid era of rule over the mainland, a historical nightmare that has frightening resonance in contemporary America.
Because Lai’s family was successful and wealthy, they were deemed “class enemies.” He saw his mother forced to kneel on shards of broken glass, wear a dunce’s cap, and bow her apologies as Communist Party officials vilified her and paraded her in front of crowds. She was sentenced to a labor camp but was able to visit home on weekends. Though she was a competent cook, she would deliberately burn rice in the forced labor camp so as to sneak the charred grain home to her children.
In 1961, Lai fled mainland China for Hong Kong in the middle of Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” a disaster that far outpaced Stalin’s atrocities and even the Nazi Holocaust in the number of casualties. Mao restructured the nation’s agricultural sector, collectivized the farms; the unsurprising consequence was a famine that killed tens of millions.
Lai was twelve years old when he arrived in Hong Kong and immediately demonstrated an impressive capacity for hard work, often sleeping on a table in the factory where he did odd jobs. At twenty-one, he was managing a factory. By his mid-twenties, he owned a factory and supplied sweaters and shirts to some of the biggest brands in the United States, like Polo and The Limited. Before long he opened a retail franchise, Giordano, and found himself a multimillionaire presiding over a manufacturing and retail empire.
In 1989, protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing were ruthlessly massacred. The episode is remembered by the iconic “Tank Man” who stopped a line of eighteen tanks by refusing to stand aside. In 1997, Great Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, but only with the proviso that China allow Hong Kong to operate with the freedom it enjoyed under Britain’s rule. China agreed, but then did the opposite—a predictable betrayal—so that Hong Kong’s tragic history of the last two-and-a-half decades has been a ruthless suppression of freedom. Of the increasingly harsh laws enacted, one should be familiar to those who read America’s Declaration of Independence. If a Hong Konger is suspected of a crime, he can be extradited to Beijing for a sham trial.
The longer he is confined, the more deeply spiritual he has become.
Lai’s response to the violence was to enter the media business and shame China for violating Chinese freedom. Then, just two years before Hong Kong was to return to Chinese control, he founded the Apple Daily newspaper. Its mix of bold, colorful graphics; gossip; local news; and opposition to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was an immediate hit. For more than two decades, Lai used Apple to push for democracy and to support events like the “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong Kong.
The motto of the newspaper? “An Apple a day keeps the liars away.”
Finding Freedom in Imprisonment
Biographer Mark Clifford’s description of Jimmy Lai’s spiritual growth in prison is easily worth the price of the book, not only for the intellectually curious reader but also for those wanting to deepen their own inner life. In 1997, Lai was baptized in the Catholic Church at Hong Kong’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. When asked what induced him to convert, Lai said he couldn’t explain it, any more than he could explain why he fell in love with his wife.
What is most impressive about Lai is not his work ethic, his creativity, his imagination, his integrity, his political conscience, or his multimillionaire status; rather, it is Lai’s spiritual growth in prison. The longer he is confined, the more deeply spiritual he has become.
Clifford explains his circumstances:
Lai’s spiritual journey has deepened in the more than a quarter-century since his conversion, especially during his time in prison. . . . He has embraced his fate as a political prisoner, even making the most of solitary confinement, which keeps him alone in a cell twenty-three hours a day, with only fifty minutes of daily outdoor exercise.
The prisoners have no air conditioning nor clocks, so that prison is physically and psychologically repressive. Lai is allowed only six books per month; his choices all seem designed to strengthen his Catholicism. They range from Chesterton to Bonhoeffer to Pope Benedict XVI.
He enjoys drawing, and most of his sketches are of Christ on the cross or the Pietà. He occasionally smuggles his personal reflections out of prison; for example, he wrote, “I’m trying to dispossess myself to enter in communion with God.” Clifford believes that Jimmy Lai’s ability to survive the conditions in prison is because of his “relentless self-examination.” Lai confesses that he should not be angry with anyone, even if the person deserves it. He writes, “I should repent of being angry with even someone who deserves . . . reproach. That is what humility is in serving God.”
Lai lived with hunger as a child; when he enjoyed success, he became something of a culinary epicurean. But now, he confesses, “I should not think of food or anything I like. I should forget myself and think of God and know Him and carry His cross with Him.” An associate observed, “Jimmy is more at peace after four years in prison than ever before in his life. He never complains about anything.”
Kindred Souls
Jimmy Lai chose The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross as one of the six books he is allowed each month. Like Lai, St. John was imprisoned in squalid circumstances; in his case, by his own order for his effort, with St. Teresa of Avila, to reform the Carmelite Order. St. John occupied a windowless six-foot-by-ten-foot cell and was given only bread, water, and an occasional sardine. He was flogged at least once a week. To read his breviary or compose his remarkable poetry, he had to stand on the concrete slab he used for a bed to take advantage of the light that came through a small slit near the ceiling. A stanza from one of St. John’s exquisite poems seems to speak not only for the Discalced Carmelite but for Lai as well:
My soul is disentangled
From every created thing
And lifted above itself
In a life of gladness
Supported only in God.
So now it can be said
That I most value this:
My soul now sees itself
Without support yet with support.