Jimmy Lai has lived a great life: as an entrepreneur, as a media magnate, as a freedom-and-democracy advocate. His friends and admirers want him to have a decent ending. He has been a political prisoner in Hong Kong for almost four years. Most of that time, he has been in solitary confinement.
I wrote about Lai — after talking to his son Sebastien and others — last year: here. Now, Mark L. Clifford has written an entire book about him: The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic. I have done a podcast with Mr. Clifford, a Q&A, here.
Mark Clifford had a long career of business and journalism in East Asia. He spent 28 years in Hong Kong. He was on the board of a Jimmy Lai company. He is the president of a group that does important work: the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.
To put it in American terms, Jimmy Lai’s story is a Horatio Alger story. “Horatio Alger on steroids,” says Clifford in our Q&A. Jimmy was an urchin on the mainland. “At twelve,” I wrote last year,
he escaped to Hong Kong. He was smuggled in the hold of a fishing boat. The voyage was rough and dangerous. People vomited all the way. But when Jimmy arrived in Hong Kong, he had really . . . arrived.
He was a child laborer in a factory, sleeping on the floor. Before long, he would be an owner of factories.
Jimmy had “an insatiable thirst for knowledge,” as Clifford says. Writers such as Hayek and Popper gave him a theoretical foundation for his instinctive beliefs. Lai is a die-hard classical liberal. Clifford describes those “instinctive beliefs” as “a raw hatred of totalitarianism and a love of freedom: free markets, free people, free religious worship, freedom of speech,” and so forth.
In that piece of mine last year, I wrote,
Allow me to intrude with a personal memory. In 2012, I was in Taipei, and I had arranged to meet some people at Apple Daily, the newspaper (based in Hong Kong) owned by Lai. Walking into the lobby, I came face-to-face with a bust of Hayek.
Jimmy Lai’s adoptive city, Hong Kong, was one of the most vibrant, dynamic, freewheeling places on earth. Now it is another city under the boot of the Chinese Communist Party. As Clifford says in our podcast, more than 1,900 people have been imprisoned on political charges. There are another 4,000 sitting in jail who have not been tried yet.
These prisoners include “some of the best and the brightest,” says Clifford, “not just Jimmy, but some of the top professors, journalists, lawyers,” et al. “In any open society, they’d be celebrated.” In Hong Kong, “they are sitting behind bars.”
As the noose tightened around Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai could have left, in a snap. He could have jetted off. Clifford says (and I will paraphrase slightly),
Jimmy has houses in Kyoto and Taipei, apartments in London and Paris. Yes, he could have gone to any of those. And people said, “Please, Jimmy, go.” He told one of them, “I’d rather be hanging from a lamp post in Central [the main business district of Hong Kong] than give the Communists the satisfaction of saying that I ran away.”
He’s a man of courage, of conviction, of principles, buttressed by his deep Catholic faith. And he felt like, although he never sought political leadership, he was a leader of sorts. He felt that, as a media person and the most outspoken business person in Hong Kong, he had a duty. He couldn’t just leave the other 7 and a half million people in Hong Kong to their fates while he went to the airport and jetted off to one of his many nice places.
So, that’s just Jimmy. He’s a troublemaker. I take the title of my book from his description of himself in one of our last conversations. Above all, he’s a man of principle and conviction. And I think that’s why the Chinese would like to keep him in prison for the rest of his life. He’s already in his late seventies. He has suffered from diabetes for a long time. He’s had Covid while in prison. He’s had not-very-successful cataract surgery.
And he’s not ready to give up. He’s as defiant as ever.
Before he went to prison, Jimmy Lai had a long talk with Natan Sharansky, the Israeli leader who spent nine years in the Soviet Gulag. Sharansky said, in essence, “I could not decide when I was going to be physically free — that was up to my captors. But I could do my best to live internally free.”
Some biographers like their subjects less, when they research and write about them. Some like them more than ever. Mark L. Clifford admires Jimmy Lai no end, and so do I, and so do lots of others, and Mark has done a real service in writing this book: The Troublemaker. Again, for our podcast, go here.