Taped on the wall by my desk is a photo of Jimmy Lai in handcuffs. It was taken a week ago, the day 200 Hong Kong police raided his Apple Daily newspaper and arrested him. It is my most treasured photo of Jimmy, who also happens to be my godson, having been baptized in 1997 just before the handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. The point is that though the handcuffs were intended to humiliate him, every man, woman, and child in Hong Kong saw them for what they were: a badge of honor.
Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn wrote the above comments in the summer of 2020. If you don’t know about Jimmy Lai, you need to. He is one of the heroes of our time. His name should be known the same way we know the names Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. We know of John Paul II not just because he was pope. He knew that the greatest freedom was to live the life God called you to, and that government has no business stifling that. The Chinese Communist government is terrified of people truly encountering God and having a real sense of a mission for their lives, a meaning beyond what the Chinese government assigns. That’s why the Communist authorities insist that even Catholics must operate under a patriotic association, adhering to the Chinese Communist Party’s rules, not the Church’s. (That the Holy See goes along and allows Cardinal Joseph Zen to be an outcast is a mystery to me and a grave sadness.) Faith makes the Chinese government vulnerable, Lai has said.
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