What to know about Catholic Jimmy Lai’s Hong Kong journey from media mogul and activist to convict

HONG KONG — To his supporters, former Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai is a fighter for democracy. To the government, he is a traitor to his motherland.

The 78-year-old outspoken critic of China’s ruling Communist Party was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison for conspiring to commit sedition and collude with foreign forces.

Observers say his trial came to symbolize a crackdown that began in 2020 on press and other freedoms that has changed Hong Kong, the former British colony that returned to China’s control in 1997.

The Hong Kong government insists Lai’s case has nothing to do with press freedom, but instead is an example of righteousness upheld by the law.

A migrant from mainland China, he made a fortune in the garment industry in Hong Kong and later founded the Apple Daily newspaper, where he wrote articles criticizing the Chinese and Hong Kong governments for limiting freedoms. The publication eventually was shuttered and his words became trial evidence.

Here is what to know about his unusual journey to political activism that has ended, at least for the moment, in prison.

A stowaway founds a clothing giant

Lai was born in 1947 in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, once known as Canton, two years before the communists came to power.

He was just 12 when he stowed away on a fishing boat to Hong Kong, about 135 kilometers (84 miles) from Guangzhou. Like many other Chinese of that era, Lai hoped for a better life in the British colony. Working as a child laborer in a glove factory served as his introduction to the garment industry.

In 1981, he founded Giordano, an affordable casual clothing chain that has grown into an international brand with 1,600 retail outlets in 30 countries, according to its website.

Shift to publishing gives Lai a voice

Lai sold his interest in Giordano in the mid-1990s when the company came under pressure from Beijing. That came after he called hard-line Premier Li Peng “the son of a turtle egg,” a slur in Chinese, after the communist leader justified the government’s deadly 1989 crackdown on protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The violent suppression was a pivotal moment for Lai, he later said. Giordano printed T-shirts in support of the pro-democracy protests and he made his first foray into publishing in 1990, founding Next Magazine.

Five years later, he started the Apple Daily, a tabloid-style publication that drew readership with sometimes sensational reports and investigative scoops. The publication openly criticized the government, which some observers now say landed Lai in trouble about 25 years down the road.

Joining activists in Hong Kong’s streets

Lai took to the streets in 2014, taking part in the pro-democracy protests known as the Umbrella Movement that for months filled parts of Hong Kong. Demonstrators used umbrellas to shield themselves from police pepper spray. The Apple Daily ran articles sympathetic to the movement.

Lai came out again in 2019 for a new wave of protests that shook the government and led to the crackdown on the city’s freedoms. He also urged U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to speak out on Hong Kong’s situation in meetings that became an issue during his trial.

The following year, China’s central government in Beijing imposed a national security law on Hong Kong. Lai was arrested more than a month later.

Lai has been in custody since December 2020. The food lover who was called “Fatty Lai” by some friends and even a rival newspaper appears to have become thinner behind bars.

A Catholic, Lai made drawings in prison of the crucifixion of Jesus, according to his friend Robert Sirico, a priest who received one of the pictures.

“For truth prevails in God’s kingdom, and that’s good enough for me,” Lai testified in November 2024 during his trial, arguing that his Apple Daily writings were done without hostility or seditious intent.

In July 2020, shortly after the commencement of the national security law under which he was eventually convicted, Lai told The Associated Press that “Hong Kong is dead.”

“If I have to go to prison, I don’t mind. I don’t care,” he said. “It won’t be something I can worry about, I’ll just relax and do what I have to do.”

Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this report.