He rose to riches in Hong Kong. Now he’s a symbol of China’s crackdown.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. HONG KONG—Jimmy Lai came to Hong Kong in 1961 as a boy smuggled on a fishing boat, a refugee who left mainland China because his mother was afraid he would starve to death in the turmoil following the Communist takeover there. He rose from child laborer to clothing tycoon and media baron, living in a colonial mansion filled with books and flowers.
His Apple Daily newspaper celebrated the city’s freewheeling outlook with reviews of brothels alongside full-throated denunciations of China’s Communist Party. When protesters, Lai among them, tried to secure democracy for Hong Kong and stop Beijing from tightening its grip, only to face exile or imprisonment, the self-made millionaire became a symbol of the city’s new era. Now, press freedom is curtailed, a draconian national security law reigns and opponents of the Communist Party risk being crushed.
Lai’s rags-to-riches-to-prison story mirrors Hong Kong’s own path from fishing outpost to neon-lit hive of unbridled commerce and, more recently, battleground for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s determination to stamp out dissent. Lai “always said Hong Kong gave me everything," said his youngest son, Sebastien Lai. “He’s a self-made man, but at some point he realized he couldn’t have had what he had if it wasn’t for Hong Kong." If Hong Kong helped make Lai, it is now trying to break him.
He has been in custody for nearly four years, having completed four sentences for his protest roles and working through another, for a 2022 fraud conviction, that lasts into 2028. He now faces charges of publishing seditious materials and violating the national security law that Beijing imposed in 2020 in response to democracy protests. To all charges, Lai has
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