Concluding a sham trial that lasted more than two years, a Hong Kong court sentenced Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison today. Since Lai is already 78 years old, this amounts to a life sentence. It comes after he has already spent more than five years in solitary confinement following convictions from other trials based on trumped-up charges.
Jimmy Lai is China’s most prominent dissident and a champion of Hong Kongers’ basic freedoms. His sentencing confirms that Hong Kong’s descent into tyranny continues. Over the years, the territory has seen a marked deterioration in its rule of law and a crackdown on freedom of expression and of assembly and association. According to the Human Freedom Index, for example, Hong Kong now ranks 143 out of 165 countries and jurisdictions worldwide in terms of freedom of association and assembly. The court’s ruling signals a persisting decline in freedom.
Lai was guilty only of standing for freedom of expression and the right to associate and assemble, but he was convicted under the territory’s draconian security law that charged him with “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces” and sedition. A highly successful entrepreneur who lost his businesses in his fight against Chinese Communist Party tyranny (including Hong Kong’s most widely read newspaper, Apple Daily, shut down by the government), Lai has been recognized by press freedom and human rights organizations around the world. In 2023, Cato honored him with our most prestigious award.
When business leaders, much less ordinary citizens, can be arbitrarily persecuted for their opinions or for the people they choose to meet with, it is difficult to see how Hong Kong’s vaunted economic freedoms and business environment will not also experience further deterioration. As the Wall Street Journal observes, “This isn’t the way Hong Kong operated under Britain. It isn’t the way a world trade and financial center operates. But it is the way of Hong Kong under Chinese rule.”
Hong Kong should free Jimmy Lai on humanitarian grounds as he is elderly, with deteriorating health, and growing frail. Not doing so will mean that he will die in jail and become a martyr. I agree with Mark Clifford—author of The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic—when he observed that “China needs to understand that Lai is more trouble in prison than outside it.”