It’s time to get wise about what Beijing is doing.
On Monday, the show trial of Jimmy Lai, the 76-year-old Hong Kong pro-democracy icon and former newspaper owner, kicked off.
Lai was first arrested in August 2020, just after Beijing imposed a new “national security law” on Hong Kong, and has since been convicted in a series of other cases, including a trumped-up fraud charge. But the trial that begins today, on national-security charges, is the most serious. If Lai is convicted — which is a near certainty considering the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on Hong Kong’s previously autonomous legal system — he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
The persecution of Lai is part of the party’s merciless campaign in Hong Kong, which it has totally subjugated in recent years. Demonstrators no longer take to the streets. Major figures within the pro-democracy movement have been forced to flee or face arrest. Independent media have been shut down; Lai’s Apple Daily was raided and forced to close.
Lai is being charged with “colluding with foreign forces” — a broad and vague provision of the national-security law designed to sweep up opponents of the Chinese Communist Party for political dissent.
On top of the bogus, politicized charges, China is keeping a man of advanced age in solitary confinement. The treatment of Lai, even against the backdrop of the party’s success in stamping out dissent within the city, is exceptionally cruel.
But Beijing is making an example out of him. The trial’s verdict is a preordained outcome. This is about demonstrating China’s totalitarian resolve to the remnants of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement that have scattered across the globe.
In that sense, the trial of Jimmy Lai is not just another totalitarian injustice being visited upon a good man; it’s a tool of repression that’s meant to go hand in hand with other efforts. Just last week, Hong Kong’s rulers put bounties on the heads of five of the pro-democracy exiles, including two in the U.S., Frances Hui and Joey Siu (the latter is an American citizen). That follows bounties that it had already placed for the apprehension of eight other figures.
The Chinese Communist Party believes that its jurisdiction is global, and that its authoritarian system is entitled to reach deep into the territory of democracies abroad. Unless the free world pushed back forcefully, the party will continue to escalate its assaults on democracy and human rights.
So far, the global response to Beijing’s evisceration of Hong Kong’s autonomy generally, and the imprisonment of Lai specifically, has been lacking. The U.S. and its allies, including the U.K., of which Lai is a citizen, are keeping serious responses in reserve. (It took until last week for a U.K. foreign secretary to meet with Lai’s son, Sebastien.)
Despite recognizing that Hong Kong is no longer separate in any meaningful sense from the mainland, Washington has failed to close the city’s diplomatic outposts in America (thus allowing the party an extra foothold in the U.S.). While it has spoken out about each new act of repression, the State Department has not issued new sanctions on Hong Kong officials since 2021. Hong Kong’s judges are an arm of the state that ought to be treated that way under U.S. sanctions policy. No doubt, President Biden’s drive to achieve a sort of détente with Beijing makes such actions even less likely. But demanding the release of Lai and the numerous other post-2020 political prisoners in Hong Kong ought to be an urgent priority of the administration.
It’s time to realize what this travesty of a case is really about. Americans, Taiwanese, and other free peoples in Communist Chinese crosshairs should regard the proceedings as what they are — a sign of things to come.