Mark L. Clifford | THE TROUBLEMAKER
Note：Excerpted from THE TROUBLEMAKER by Mark L. Clifford. Copyright © 2024 by Mark L. Clifford. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
MARK L. CLIFFORD is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, the former executive director of the Asia Business Council, and a former board member at Next Digital. He is editorial chair of the Asian Review of Books, and served as editor in chief of both English-language papers in Hong Kong, The Standard and the South China Morning Post. An honors history graduate of UC Berkeley and a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, he holds a Ph.D. in Hong Kong history from the University of Hong Kong.
A deep harbor separates Hong Kong Island from the city’s Kowloon district. Three tunnels link the island with the mainland. They only close in extreme circumstances. In July 2022, the eastern tunnel was shut during a visit to the city by Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. Another tunnel was shut again in December 2023 for a different kind of dignitary. Authorities organized a special motorcade for Jimmy Lai, the businessman and democracy activist, to transport him in chains from the maximum-security prison where he is kept in solitary confinement to a special trial that could see him sent to prison for life.
The strip searches required before he leaves prison don’t faze Lai, for he knows that he will see loved ones during court appearances. “Tomorrow, I need to go to court and have to go through a body search, taking off all my clothing in front of the guards,” he wrote before a 2021 court date. “Humiliating, but I don’t care, for I get to see my family members, friends, and supporters. Seeing them puts me back into the reality of the world outside and the emotional exchange is so uplifting.”
Streets were closed to traffic on that December morning as a convoy of police cars and motorcycle outriders accompanied an oversized armored car carrying the prisoner, who sat shackled inside a cage. The lumbering vehicle wound along the narrow oceanfront road from Stanley Prison on Hong Kong Island’s southern coast before turning north and entering the Aberdeen Tunnel and then the Cross-Harbour Tunnel on its way to the West Kowloon Courts.
Outside the court, dogs and one thousand police guarded against any potential disruption. They provided the sort of security one would expect for a president or a high-profile terrorist rather than a seventy-five-year-old devout Catholic who had long professed a commitment to nonviolence. The show of force accompanied the trial of Hong Kong’s most committed dissident and China’s best-known political prisoner.
Inside the court, Lai sat in a glass box, listening to the proceedings with the help of hearing aids. He had eye surgery not long before the trial and, even with the help of glasses, struggled to read material projected onto the courtroom screen. He was thinner than he was before he entered prison. He survived Covid in jail and has aged during the three years he spent behind bars before his trial began. At six feet one, he has a commanding presence; the tens of pounds of weight he has lost during his time in prison imbue him with a newly ascetic appearance.
Lai swapped his brown convict’s uniform for a blue oxford shirt and a light-colored Loro Piana blazer. It was a show trial and authorities had let the main character dress as he wished.
Defendants in Hong Kong often wear nice clothes in hopes of convey- ing respectability to a jury. That wasn’t the case with this trial. Contrary to promises made by China for continued jury trials, authorities denied Lai this right, trying him instead before a panel of handpicked judges. He wore his clothes for his own dignity.
Lai built his fortune on sweaters and polo shirts but outside of jail had built his wardrobe around jeans and button-down cotton shirts or loose- fitting linen ones. He favored clip-on suspenders and for a time even sported overalls—a style unique among Hong Kong’s tycoons.
It wasn’t just clothes that set Jimmy Lai apart. For more than three decades, he had fought for freedom and democracy as a vocal and effective critic of Hong Kong’s and China’s leaders. Like millions of others among Hong Kong’s seven million people, he distrusted communist China and wanted the city to enjoy the rights and freedoms it had been promised when Beijing took control of the British colony in 1997.
He had money—a fortune estimated at $1.2 billion before the government came after him, his wealth earned after he arrived in Hong Kong as a twelve- year-old with less than five dollars in his pocket. He spent well over $100 million of his own money to fund Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. His enormously popular Apple Daily newspaper and Next magazine set the political agenda in Hong Kong, ultimately becoming an opposition force in a city that has never known democracy. “The Chinese Communist Party hates Jimmy so much because they are afraid of his media empire,” says veteran journalist Ching Cheong, who had been sympathetic enough to Beijing that he had earlier held a senior position at the communist mouth- piece Wen Wei Po in Hong Kong. “His media is very important for the democratization of Hong Kong. The CCP treat propaganda as one of their lifelines. Jimmy’s media empire succeeded in refuting many of their lies.” He is fearless. In 2020, when the government banned commemoration of the Tiananmen massacre, Lai defiantly knelt alone in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, the traditional remembrance site. He lit a candle. “If commemorating those who died because of injustice is a crime, then . . . let me suffer the punishment,” he told the court before being sentenced to fourteen months in prison for this act of “inciting” an “illegal assembly.”
Hong Kong has scores of billionaires, but not one of them dared to stand up to China while the city’s freedoms were whittled away. And Hong Kong has spawned many brave democracy campaigners, but none could nurture the movement with a mass-media spotlight, let alone bankroll it. Lai played a significant role in mounting the biggest democratic challenge to the Chinese Communist Party since the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement. He is literally one in a billion. In a conversation in 2020, as the charges against him multiplied, Lai mused: “It is just natural they nail me. I have the news- paper, which is an opposition newspaper supporting the movement. I amvery vocal opposing the Communists. I participate in every resistance [that is, demonstration and protest march]. For them, I am a troublemaker. It is hard for them not to clamp down on me and silence me.”
Lai defies easy characterization. His success as a pragmatic businessman meant that he approached human rights activism in a results-oriented way. He’s interested in freedom, but you won’t hear him talk much about social justice. His philosophy verges on libertarian, contending that government should play a limited role beyond providing order and a strong rule of law. A Catholic, he is a militant anticommunist in the mold of John Paul II, the Polish pope who encouraged the democratic uprisings in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jimmy Lai is one of the most important political prisoners of our age, yet he has many more champions on the right wings of the American and British political spectrums than on the left. He’s a voracious reader and a prolific columnist who aspires to the role of a public intellectual, but he is too action-oriented to fit into the intellectual tradition of China’s Liu Xiaobo, the Soviet Union’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Poland’s Adam Michnik.
Unlike many prisoners of conscience, he isn’t affiliated with a political party. He doesn’t seek political power, unlike long-detained activists such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Poland’s Lech Walesa, or Russia’s Alexei Navalny, who was murdered in a Russian prison as I was finishing this manuscript and whose death makes Lai’s case all the more pressing. A businessman, he has faith in markets and believes in the importance of eco- nomic growth in promoting freedom. Policy-making bores him. He has an entrepreneur’s certainty and bluntness. His solutions are simple, bordering on simplistic—they revolve around more freedom, more democracy, and less government regulation. He talks less about universal human rights than about “values,” especially what he calls “Western values,” by which he means freedom and tolerance and the use of law to give people a sense of security. “He is very different,” notes Notre Dame political scientist and Hong Kong native Victoria Tin-bor Hui. “A lot of freedom fighters tend to be lawyers— activists who raise their arms or intellectuals. He is a businessman who just basically really cares about his home, Hong Kong, and the cause of democracy.” In late 2019, when he gave a talk with Martin Lee at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, observers found themselves surprised that “he didn’t say anything too provocative” and was “so mild and so shy,” she remembers.
There are many courageous people in Hong Kong. Lai’s wealth and international stature set him apart. So, too, does the role that Apple Daily and Next magazine played in developing the pro-democracy movement. “Without Apple Daily there would be no Hong Kong pro-democracy move- ment,” says attorney Kevin Yam, a prominent overseas activist who is wanted by the Hong Kong authorities. “It’s as simple as that.”
The publications, under Lai’s leadership, did more than just push a democracy agenda. They helped the people of Hong Kong believe in them- selves and shake off the sense of being second-class citizens that often characterizes people in colonies. Lai and his team nurtured a sense of polit- ical and civic engagement in a city that its residents had often treated as a transient stopping-off place.
The combination of his wealth and stubborn defense of individual lib- erty makes Lai a dangerous opponent to Chinese authorities. So afraid is Beijing of this septuagenarian that he faces the very real possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars for the crime of “colluding” with foreigners—notably by meeting with the likes of Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and calling for sanctions against human rights abusers in Hong Kong.
Totalitarian governments cannot tolerate dissent. Everyone who fights against the lies and propaganda in Xi’s China must be treated as a threat. One person opposing the government today could be one hundred tomor- row, one thousand next week, and one million a month from now. Indeed, Lai and his journalists showed that they could generate that sort of oppo- sition to the Hong Kong government, since his newspaper and magazine helped bring hundreds of thousands and then millions of protesters into the city’s streets in 2003, 2014, and 2019.
For more than two decades after Hong Kong’s handover to China, Lai pushed for democracy. A British citizen since 1992, he traveled abroad fre- quently, especially to the United States, often with the prominent lawyer and fellow democracy activist Martin Lee. Lai was well-known in Washington. China reacted with fury to his meetings with Pence and Pompeo in 2019. “The U.S. is well aware of who Lai Chee-ying is, what his stance is and what role he plays in the Hong Kong society,” fumed a spokesperson from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, using his full Chinese name. “At the current sensitive period in Hong Kong, top U.S. officials lining up to meet with such a person have ulterior motives and sends a serious wrong signal.” Pence doesn’t see it that way. He met Lai in the White House at Pompeo’s request, in order to host “a great courageous champion of democracy in Hong Kong to encourage him.” For Pence, Lai ranks with heroic Soviet-era dissidents like Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky. Pence is impressed that Lai has been “willing to take a stand and ultimately to be walked out in handcuffs when he could have been anywhere else. He didn’t have to stay, but he stayed. It was incredibly inspiring to me.”
Lai had every chance to leave Hong Kong before his arrest and imprison- ment in 2020. He owns houses and apartments in Kyoto, London, Paris, and Taipei, and he knew that the Chinese Communist Party would target him if he stayed in Hong Kong after it imposed a sweeping national security law on the city in mid-2020. Instead of fleeing, he doubled down. In his last five months of freedom, he livestreamed weekly video programs featuring politicians, dip- lomats, journalists, and religious figures. He preferred to go to jail for freedom and democracy rather than abandon the city that, he says, “gave me everything.” Lai has received a slew of media freedom awards since going to prison.
Groups honoring him range from the Committee to Protect Journalists to the Catholic University of America to the libertarian Cato Institute. The city of Lyon bestowed honorary citizenship on him in recognition both of his love of freedom and his love of French food.
For Lai is no ascetic. He is knowledgeable and deeply invested in fine food and wine. He entertains generously—many a foreign correspondent has been a guest in his home, as have countless business associates, foreign politicians, religous figures, and other dignitaries. As a young entrepreneur in the fast-fashion trade, Lai lived a bawdy, even lascivious lifestyle. All that is past. He’s now embraced a monkish existence inside Stanley Prison, reading exclusively Catholic philosophy, and painting and drawing Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. He doesn’t complain. He has chosen his path.
I met Jimmy Lai in 1993 when I interviewed him for a profile for the Far Eastern Economic Review and saw him several times a year over the next three decades. He is generous and, as a result, I enjoyed dozens of excursions to Hong Kong’s outlying islands on his boats, the first a modest junk (Free China) and the next an Azimut luxury yacht bearing his wife Teresa’s middle name, Lisa. On scores of other occasions, I joined lunches and dinners with journalists, professors, missionaries, economists, and political leaders. Lai and Teresa were renowned for their hospitality, good food, and the warmth with which they welcomed visitors into their homes and onto their boats. In May 2017, I took part in a weeklong bus tour of America with Lai and more than a dozen others; human rights campaigner Ellen Bork, who for a time had worked in Hong Kong for pro-democracy legislator Martin Lee, suggested at a November 2016 dinner at Lai’s house that we should travel around the country to better understand newly elected Donald Trump’s appeal. Lai had supported Trump in that election, and he jumped at the idea. The trip started in New York City and traveled via Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland to Chicago. From there we headed south, through Des Moines, Topeka, and Dallas to Houston before jogging east to New Orleans. Meetings with senior leaders at three universities—Carnegie Mellon, Notre Dame, and Northwestern—to discuss subjects ranging from artificial intelligence and machine learning to the changing media world constituted the intellectual highlights of the trip. We also met prominent Republican figures, including Kansas governor Sam Brownback and former Louisiana governor Bobby Jin- dal. We got a little closer to ordinary concerns when we ate at a restaurant in Cleveland staffed by formerly incarcerated people and, the following morning, met with a woman on the front lines of the opioid crisis.
I served on the board of directors of Lai’s media company, Next Digital, from 2018 until authorities forced it to close in 2021. Lai had founded the Hong Kong stock exchange–listed company, known first as Next Media and later as Next Digital, and owned 71 percent of it. I also moderated most of the approximately twenty weekly livestream shows that he did from July 2020 until he was imprisoned in December. As such, I participated in some of the events at Apple Daily and elsewhere that are at the heart of the government’s case against Jimmy Lai. What amazed me the most is the courage and dignity with which he has embraced his fate.
I have the privilege of being free—following Lai’s imprisonment, six Apple Daily colleagues were jailed, including one of my fellow Next Digital directors. The company’s bank accounts were frozen and the newspaper forced to close. The government launched four separate investigations into the company’s collapse, looking into what responsibility that the directors— including me—might have; this Kafkaesque turn of events in blaming the victim would be laughable were my colleagues not in jail. I am outside of Hong Kong and have no business or family ties there, making retaliation less likely. I now head the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, which seeks to free all of Hong Kong’s political prisoners, including Lai.
I never expected to write a book about Lai, but the extraordinary cir- cumstances in which he finds himself demand it. If Jimmy Lai is guilty, he is guilty of excessive optimism, guilty of believing that China would keep its promises to leave Hong Kong alone for fifty years.
History is littered with examples of single individuals posing earthshaking threats to totalitarian regimes. Oddly, it is precisely at those moments when dictatorships are wielding their most repressive power—when all others have receded into terrified silence—that these stubborn personalities prove most vexatious. As Xi’s grip on power tightens, and as China’s democracy movement reaches at its lowest ebb in decades, Jimmy Lai refuses to yield. That is why the Chinese Communist Party fears him. His courage matters.
