Jimmy Lai’s Free-Market Witness

M uch ink has rightly been spilled covering Jimmy Lai and the heroic Hong Kong dissident’s ongoing persecution. An unyielding champion of democracy and free speech, Lai’s deep Catholic faith has been a source of strength during his yearslong torment at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. These qualities are integral to his invincible independence, even in the face of what, for a 78-year-old Lai, may well be a life sentence — 20 years in prison — for defying Beijing’s authoritarianism.

But there has been a less well-publicized angle to Lai’s ordeal — one that is not intuitive for many observers. Lai’s suffering clearly shows that a free-market system and private property rights are essential guarantors of freedom of speech, of religion, and of the other civil liberties that we take for granted in the West.

Start with Lai’s literal rags-to-riches story: Sneaking into Hong Kong from the mainland as a stowaway, he began his career as a child laborer in a garment factory. By adulthood, he had risen to become a factory manager. Lai invested his year-end bonus to purchase a bankrupt garment factory that he turned around and used to create a global clothing brand. Within a few years, Lai had 8,000 employees and 2,400 shops around the world.

An inveterate entrepreneur, Lai purchased and managed luxury properties in Canada. He tried his hand — and failed — at an online grocery and retail business. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre inspired Lai to move into publishing and politics. Lai founded Apple Daily, a scrappy, fearless, and sometimes sensational tabloid that soon became the second-largest publication in Hong Kong.

When the regime of Xi Jinping began to trample the electoral, speech, and protest rights of Hong Kongers, Lai and Apple Daily were there to document every last arrest and baton blow. Lai’s courage was rewarded with trumped-up charges of sedition and conspiring with foreign powers, for which he received that 20-year sentence. But Lai’s only crime was honestly reporting on how Beijing betrayed its commitment to manage “one country, two systems” after the British flag came down over Hong Kong in 1997.

Lai’s plight shows us that America’s constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and religion rest on both timeless ideals as well as a concrete economic foundation. From Benjamin Franklin to Jimmy Lai, newspapers have required presses, distribution networks, investors, and advertisers to operate. Like Lai, America’s Founders did not imagine speech as detached from commerce. They lived in a world where pamphleteers often owned their printing presses. The right to speak freely was dependent upon the right to own the tools that amplified that speech.

Lai understood that connection instinctively, saying he went into the business of journalism because “information is choice and choice is freedom.” He built the media company behind Apple Daily into a thriving business long before it became the eyes, ears, and voice of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Indeed, his career forces authoritarian governments to face an uncomfortable truth — media owners are hard to silence because economic independence enables editorial independence. Profit, in this sense, becomes a form of insulation against political control.

That insulation is exactly what Beijing’s National Security Law set out to dismantle. Beijing-aligned authorities deployed the law to seize HK$18 million of Apple Daily’s assets, alleging that the newspaper’s tough reporting on China’s repression was the result of a foreign conspiracy. Lai and others were arrested, but some brave editors and writers risked their freedom by continuing to publish and chronicle the story of Beijing’s efforts to financially hobble Apple Daily. But the newspaper could no longer pay staff or suppliers. While the media’s attention focused on the drama of newsroom raids and arrests at Apple Daily, the seizure of the newspaper’s assets in 2021 was the fatal blow.

The National Security Law empowers Chinese authorities to reach into the financial lifeblood of media organizations through asset freezes, surveillance, and official support for the claim that Apple Daily was “endangering national security.” The implications are devastating for a free and independent media: When authorities can track communications, pressure advertisers, and freeze accounts, they do not need to censor an article directly. They can simply make it impossible to publish. Destroy the business model, and you silence the voice — without ever having to issue a formal ban.

For Americans, Lai’s trial should encourage us to further treasure our economic and constitutional traditions. The same legal system that protects a columnist’s opinion also protects the entrepreneur who invests in a newsroom or owns a website. Without those economic rights, freedom of the press risks becoming freedom to speak but not freedom to be heard.

Lai’s journey from media entrepreneur to political prisoner is a reminder that capitalism and constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties reinforce one another. Markets alone cannot guarantee freedom, but neither can freedom survive long without the economic independence that markets provide.