The imprisoned newspaperman’s ‘will to do right’ has always been his driving force.
The imprisoned newspaperman’s ‘will to do right’ has always been his driving force.
O n February 9, Hong Kong newspaperman Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison for publishing “seditious materials” and for “collusion with foreign forces.” At 78 years old and in tenuous health, Lai has already been in prison for more than five years — mostly in solitary confinement.
For all his suffering, Lai could have chosen a more comfortable route. Residence in Hong Kong when it was a British colony had qualified him for British citizenship, and he could easily have left for London after Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997. But Beijing had promised Hong Kong “one country, two systems” and “no change for 50 years.” Lai stayed, and he continued to stay even after the sinews of Beijing’s autocratic rule began to invade and strangle the city “to which,” says Lai, “I owe everything.”
He had fled to Hong Kong at age twelve, alone and penniless, by stowing away on a fishing boat. It was 1961, a year of great famine in his native China. Upon arrival, he found a job as a laborer in a glove factory. Gifted with a wizardly intelligence, he watched how things worked in the factory, learned quickly, and found higher-level posts at a number of other garment factories. Eventually, he left to start his own factory and, later, clothing chain called Giordano, which ended up growing to a worth of hundreds of millions of dollars. He also bought an English dictionary and set out to teach himself the language; before long, Lai was a voracious reader of English-language texts in fields spanning history, economics, and philosophy. In the 1990s, he began to publish magazines as well as the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, whose circulation rocketed to second-highest in the city.
Where did he get his Midas touch? I asked a long-time colleague of Lai’s and was surprised to hear the answer: He approached consumers “with humility.” Whether in clothing or media, he watched and listened for what people wanted; he did not begin by deciding what they ought to want. His reading brought him to Friedrich Hayek, who made a deep impression on him. Hayek argued that economics could never be a science like physics or chemistry. Human choices are far too numerous and unpredictable to be grasped by a formula. It was a fatal flaw of state socialism to assume that government planners could, in fact, achieve such a grasp, and it was fatefully dangerous that planners could not perceive their own limits in this matter. Charging forward, they inevitably put their societies on “a road to serfdom.” It was far better, said Hayek, to free “millions of individuals” to make their own choices. This was his “lesson in humility,” and Jimmy Lai embraced it. Understanding the preferences of his consumers called for empathy.
But Lai’s humility was not the same as timidity. To him, the questions “what do people want?” and “what should I do about it?” were fundamentally different. The first called for modesty, the second for zeal. As a boy inside China, he had witnessed political executions, and as an adult, he still had nightmares about them. And now people cried out for democracy? A free press? The rule of law? Lai was more than supportive; he was proactive. When student protesters filled Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, Lai sent them tents, blankets, and cash. When the regime dispatched tanks and machine guns to massacre the protesters and then published a list of the “most wanted” among those whom it was still pursuing, Lai helped to organize Operation Yellowbird, a project that worked to rescue refugees from the massacre and spirit them safely outside China.
I first met Lai in June 1989 in Hong Kong. He told me nothing of Operation Yellowbird, but we spoke at length about current affairs, and we soon discovered that we shared many of the same views. Sometime later, after I had returned to my teaching at Princeton, my local bank notified me that a considerable sum of money had been wired into my account from Hong Kong. Guessing it was from Jimmy, I asked him what the funds were for. “Use it to help people who are trying to make China a better place,” he answered. He knew I had contacts with the overseas Chinese democracy movement.
Lai’s long-time colleague spoke to me of his yiqi — his “will to do right.” Everyone who has worked for Lai senses this in him, said the friend. Yiqi is a deeply rooted value in Chinese popular culture. It manifests in heroic characters — some historical, but mostly fictional — called xia (pronounced “s’yah”). The term is conventionally translated as “knight-errant”; the closest the West has to a xia is Robin Hood.
A xia dresses in shabby clothing while commanding (and usually hiding) exquisite skills in the martial arts. When he (although occasionally she, as female xia do exist) sees injustice, his first task is to right the wrong. A xia cares especially for the poor and downtrodden. A xia never considers private interests; only what is right and what is wrong are relevant. A xia spends years honing technical skills, but the core nature of a xia is not learned — it is given.
Neither Jimmy Lai’s colleague nor I would argue that Lai is a xia in a literal sense. But xia-like? A possessor of yiqi? Yes. I last saw Jimmy Lai in December 2019 at a dinner party at his home in Hong Kong. A new law had recently been proposed: Now, a person accused of a crime in Hong Kong could be sent to the mainland for trial and punishment. The prospect was terrifying. About two million of Hong Kong’s seven million residents took to the streets in protest. Jimmy Lai went to the front line, and his presence was noted by every journalist and camera in sight. Near the end of the evening, I gathered the courage to ask what I think everyone else was also wondering. “Why do you do this, Jimmy?” Why did he take such risks?
He looked at me, pellucid and unguarded. “It’s just me,” he said. “It’s who I am. What can I do?”
To review: Beijing accuses Jimmy Lai of importing Western values. In some ways, this is true. But his xia-like nature certainly did not originate in Washington or London. It is thoroughly Chinese. Yet Xi Jinping and Chinese authorities choose to imprison it.