Jimmy Lai is risking everything for democracy. We can't ignore what China is doing
For those who speak of the global perils to democracy, a grim milestone deserves their rapt attention and full-throated condemnation: The Feb. 9 sentencing in a Chinese court of Hong Kong dissident Jimmy Lai.
In the imagination of the Chinese Communist Party, Lai’s sentencing closes the book on a troublesome man: a Catholic, a publisher, a democrat. Lai, 78 and in failing health, was condemned under the elastic logic of the Beijing-imposed National Security Law, and is meant to disappear quietly into history.
We must hope that Lai’s story instead endures as an indictment of China’s regime.
Not for violence, espionage or corruption. Lai’s crime was to have run a newspaper, Apple Daily, that gave coverage to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and reported critically on the city’s Beijing-appointed overseers.
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Lai’s severe 20-year sentence is designed to teach a lesson: that in today’s Hong Kong, conscience is subversion; that loyalty to truth is treason; that even peaceful dissent will be crushed without apology.
Lai came to Hong Kong as a penniless refugee. He began life as a child laborer before eventually becoming a garment tycoon. He gave away his successful business, the popular Giordano retail brand, to build a newspaper to defend the liberties that made his life possible. Lai could have fled China’s takeover of Hong Kong, but chose to stay, reasoning: "If I don’t stand up, who will?"
The manner in which Lai’s case has been conducted is morally obscene. He has been denied the right to choose his own legal counsel. His lawyers have been harassed. His newspaper was shuttered by force. His staff were arrested, his assets frozen. The sentencing merely formalizes a persecution that has been ongoing for some time.
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Jimmy’s daughter, Claire, shared with me a list of the books Jimmy has been reading in custody. They are not light diversions. They are dense, demanding theological works—Augustine, Aquinas, Guardini, Ratzinger Francis X. Van Thuan (himself a prisoner of communist Vietnam). These are the companions of a man seeking not comfort, but endurance.
Jimmy’s relationship with Claire reminds me of another imprisoned conscience: St. Thomas More, locked in the Tower of London for refusing to betray his faith and flatter an autocrat. More’s letters to his daughter Meg are among the most luminous prison writings in Western tradition — tender, playful, disciplined and utterly free.
More, of course, became one of history’s most enduring symbols of resistance to despotic repression. We must hope the same becomes true of Jimmy Lai.
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The Chinese Communist Party insists that Lai’s case is an internal matter, beyond the concern of the international community. But Hong Kong’s autonomy was guaranteed by treaty. Its freedoms were promised to the world. The destruction of its rule of law is not domestic housekeeping; it is a breach of trust with global consequences.
And its chilling effect will extend far beyond Lai’s prison cell. Journalists and teachers will self-censor. Priests will wonder which homily might cross an invisible line. Students will learn not how to argue, but how to survive.
This is the logic of totalitarianism: it does not need to imprison everyone. It only needs to imprison the right people — publicly, brutally and decisively, so the rest internalize the lesson.
That is why protest against Lai’s sentence cannot be ritualistic or half-hearted. It must be sustained and morally vigorous. Western governments cannot content themselves with statements of "concern." They must treat this as a defining test and respond accordingly: public, high-level advocacy. Real diplomatic pressure. Support for Hong Kong’s exiled journalists and institutions.
There is reason — however fragile — for hope. President Donald Trump has taken a vocal interest in Lai’s case and is expected to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping in April. Place not one’s trust in princes, the Psalms tell us, but history often unexpectedly turns on such moments.
In my conversations with Jimmy over the years, what always struck me was not anger, but joy. Not bitterness, but gratitude. He spoke about freedom as a gift. He spoke about faith as a relationship. He never imagined himself a hero. He simply refused to betray what he had seen.
History is full of such figures: men and women whom regimes tried to bury, only to discover they had planted seeds.
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The sentence imposed on him should not be remembered as an act of strength, but as a confession of weakness.
Because if Jimmy Lai is remembered — if his name is spoken, his case defended, his courage honored — then a prison cell cannot contain his legacy.
But if Jimmy Lai is forgotten, Hong Kong could be finished as a symbol of hope for future democracy in China.
The regime will write its sentence. History will write the verdict.