Mark Clifford concludes a fine profile of Jimmy Lai, who has been in prison for more than five years, by making a plea for his release (The Independent, June 22, 2026).
“He is ready to die in prison. That would be a tragedy for Lai and a disaster for China. It’s time for Chinese authorities to free Jimmy Lai. It’s the right thing to do. It’s also the smart thing to do. Lai would be less trouble quietly retired in England than attracting global attention in prison.”
An example
Lai should be released; he should never have been behind bars for a single minute. But Clifford suggests that the Chinese Communist Party is pained by the attention being paid to the Lai case and would have preferred to avoid it. If so, why the long-drawn-out show trial—when the CCP so often incarcerates dissidents secretly and, when bothering to stage a fake trial for them, conducts those proceedings secretly? As Clifford himself states, the Party has sought to make an example of Lai.
Also, if he were ever released, whether Jimmy Lai would then “quietly retire” depends on whether he could regain enough health and strength and would have enough time to pick up where he left off. Lai resigned himself to prison because he was determined to speak out and didn’t want to let the tyrants chase him out of Hong Kong. If he again becomes free and able to speak his mind, is he not going to do so?
Clifford:
Lai left famine-ravaged China as a penniless 12-year-old during the Maoist era. He smuggled himself into Hong Kong and became one of the British colony’s most successful entrepreneurs. He built his first fortune manufacturing sweaters and his next one selling T-shirts. When the Beijing Spring democracy movement came to China in 1989, his fast-fashion Giordano chain sold T-shirts supporting the protesters and sent the money to students camped in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
After the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989, Lai turned his energy to media. First with Next Magazine and then with Apple Daily, in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan, he built the world’s largest and most influential independent Chinese-language media operation. By the early 2000s, he had almost 4,000 staffers.
He pushed China to make good on its promises to the people of Hong Kong….
When it became clear China would not honour its promises, students and others took to the streets in the 2014 Umbrella uprising. Lai was there, not at the front, but supporting students and a younger generation of activists, sitting in front of his tent during every one of the 79 days of the Hong Kong Occupy movement. He was teargassed and, at the end of the occupation, arrested on civil disobedience charges….
In 2019, when millions of Hong Kongers protested China’s tightening squeeze on the city, Lai and Apple Daily were there. With an apartment in London and a house in Kyoto, he certainly could have taken friends’ advice and left. He refused, saying that he would “rather be hanging from a tree in Central than give the communists the satisfaction of saying that I ran away.”
Lai’s refusal to buckle, and his refusal to plead guilty, ensured that the communist party would make an example of him. The national security law charges against him were laughably bogus—he called for targeted individual sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials, clearly within his free speech rights. The panel of hand-picked judges, though, didn’t let the facts slow them in their haste to prove Lai guilty. Their 855-page verdict showed simply that Lai was guilty of believing in democracy—and using his media empire to support his beliefs.
Xi Jinping will never release Jimmy Lai. I hope I’m wrong.
