Jimmy Lai is one of the most important political prisoners of our age.
The 76-year-old Hong Kong billionaire has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party for three decades. In 1995, he founded Apple Daily, the popular Chinese-language newspaper that railed against the authoritarianism of Beijing, until its bank accounts were frozen in 2021. In the intervening years, Lai was a fixture at pro-democracy protests, from the Umbrella Revolution of 2014 to the Water Revolution of 2019. He’s been tear-gassed. His home has been firebombed. And four years ago, on New Year’s Eve, he was jailed.
Since then, Lai has been in solitary confinement, in a maximum security prison at the very edge of Hong Kong. He has been charged with both publishing seditious content and foreign collusion. The trial is ongoing; Lai testified two weeks ago.
Among the human rights activists calling for his release is his former colleague, Mark L. Clifford—who served on the board of Lai’s media company, Next Digital, until it, too, was forced to close in 2021. Clifford is now the leader of The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation—an organization dedicated to freeing the city’s political prisoners—as well as the author of a brand-new book published this week, called The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic. We’re proud to bring you an excerpt of that book today.
The Troublemaker begins with a short foreword by Free Press hero Natan Sharansky—who himself spent nine years as a political prisoner in a Soviet gulag. He had several conversations with Lai in late 2020, when the latter knew he was about to be arrested; Sharansky asked him, “Why won’t you try to escape?” It was more than possible: Lai is rich enough to charter a private jet, and he has British citizenship. “I can’t do it,” Lai answered. “I called my people to fight. They look at me. I can’t let them down.”
Sharansky writes that Lai “asked how to cope with isolation, uncertainty, and fear when the heavy doors closed behind you. This brave man hardly needed any advice. What I learned from hard experience, he grasped instinctively”—which is this: “While your body may be shackled in prison, your spirit can be free.”
Lai is keeping a diary in prison, and some of the entries have been smuggled out—revealing that Lai’s spirit does indeed remain free, even as his body is trapped behind bars. In the following essay, Clifford draws on Lai’s accounts, to shine a light on life as a political prisoner under a brutal regime. —The Editors
Jimmy Lai cannot communicate freely. He sees his family between two and four times a month for 30-minute monitored visits. His friends can only see him during his court appearances. Cameras are not allowed in the courtroom, so few photos of Lai have been seen since the end of 2020. His mail is censored and limited. Because he is a symbol of Hong Kong resistance, authorities want to erase him.
But Lai has documented his time as a political prisoner in diary entries, written in English with a pencil. Some of them have been smuggled out, and they paint a vivid portrait of life behind bars.
