Jimmy Lai Faces Communist Justice in Hong Kong

Jimmy couldn’t be here tonight. He couldn’t be here because he is confined to a jail cell in Hong Kong. On Dec. 8 he will be 74 years old. But China’s Communists have jailed him because even at his advanced age they fear him. He is a dangerous example of the power of freedom, which he has dared to fight for no matter the consequences.

Those of us in the American press like to use the cliché of speaking truth to power. We give ourselves credit for reporting on the rich and powerful. But truth be told, we have it easy. We write under the protection of the First Amendment and the American rule of law. We have little chance of suffering for our work, and we congratulate ourselves with prizes—often with more self-regard than we deserve.

Jimmy risked everything to speak democratic truth to Communist power. That is real courage.

Jimmy Lai was born in 1948 in mainland China, as the Communist revolution was taking power. He and his two siblings had to fend for themselves as his mother raised them alone and worked away from home during the week.

As Jimmy has told the story and others have chronicled, at age 10 he was working as a baggage carrier at a train station when a passenger tipped him with a chocolate bar. He vowed to flee to a place where such things could be found. When he was 12 his mother arranged for smugglers to help him escape from China, which was then enduring the mad privation of Communist equality.

So Jimmy arrived in Hong Kong, where he worked in a sweatshop, earning the equivalent of $8 a month. He taught himself English, and by age 20 he was running the factory. A few years later he founded his own clothing company, Giordano, which he built into a retail chain with more than 2,000 stores in 30 countries.

Jimmy could have lived the rest of his life in billionaire comfort. But in 1989 he watched the Tiananmen massacre unfold in Beijing, and he decided to bring the message of freedom to the people of Hong Kong and China. He decided to start up Apple Daily and Next Media, and Apple Daily was popular, with 600,000 subscribers at its peak in a city of 7.5 million people.

Jimmy first entered The Wall Street Journal orbit when

Bill McGurn

recommended to editor

Gordon Crovitz

that the Far Eastern Economic Review, our sister publication, do a story on Jimmy and his clothing line. After the story appeared, Jimmy invited Bill and Gordon to lunch. Gordon sent Bill a handwritten note. Bill read it as saying that Jimmy was the only person in Hong Kong who had read everything written by Friedrich Engels—as in the Engels of

Karl Marx

and “The Communist Manifesto.”

Not exactly. What Jimmy had written is that he was the only man who had read everything by

Friedrich Hayek.

There’s a difference. Jimmy Lai is wild about Hayek. He loves “The Road to Serfdom,” perhaps because he had lived on that road and saw where it led.

Jimmy used Apple Daily and Next Media to promote democracy in Hong Kong, and the autonomy that China had promised would last 50 years. He and others succeeded so well that millions of Hong Kongers, especially the young, began to organize and vote for democracy. But this was something the Communist Party in Beijing saw as a profound threat. So they passed a national security law that became the excuse to arrest Jimmy and others who had protested silently in the streets for freedom.

As you can see, Jimmy is an entrepreneur who believes in capitalism and freedom. I often hear the term “corporate media” used on the political right these days as a form of derision. It is an unfortunate phrase. A corporation is merely a form of ownership. It has no principles in and of itself. Corporate media can be good or bad depending on who runs it.

Jimmy ran a media corporation, just as my boss

Rupert Murdoch

does. Corporate media can be a great protector and promoter of free and independent journalism because it provides the resources to defend against the depredations of government.

That’s why the Hong Kong government, which claims to protect private contracts, proceeded not only to arrest Jimmy and his editors but to destroy Next and shut down Apple. The Communists had to destroy Jimmy’s company as well as his publication.

As the Communist vise closed around Hong Kong, Jimmy’s many friends saw he was in danger and urged him to leave. He has a British passport and could have lived in the United Kingdom or other places.

Mark Simon,

Jimmy’s business partner for 20 years, tells the story of retired Gen.

Jack Keane,

a friend, telling Mark to tell Jimmy to leave. He told Mark to tell Jimmy that’s an order.

Jimmy told Mark to tell the general that, just as Jack had felt a duty to fight for his country in Vietnam, Jimmy felt it was his duty now—as an old man who had received so much in life—to fight for Hong Kong, which had provided the freedom for him to prosper.

So Jimmy stayed in Hong Kong. Eventually he was arrested. He will no doubt be convicted, and he may spend the rest of his life in prison. Probably only the intervention of the U.S. government might someday spring him. Or at least that is what those of us who are his friends pray for.

Jimmy is a man of faith, having converted to Catholicism late in life, and Bill McGurn was his sponsor and godfather. No doubt that faith helps to sustain him in prison.

For those of us today who are free, those of us who are protected by the First Amendment, those of us with a platform to speak—our job is to keep Jimmy’s story alive. To never let the world forget this just man’s unjust treatment.

The Chinese Communist government will fall eventually. Tyrannies always fall, even if it takes longer than we hope. And when the Communists do fall, Jimmy Lai will be recognized as one of the heroes of Chinese freedom. Meanwhile, he serves as a model of courage and conviction for all of us who believe in free markets and free people.