The choice of Person of the Year by Time magazine and the Financial Times seemed inevitable.
But here’s an alternative nominee a world away from Mar-a-Lago, for readers of The Australian: an extraordinary figure who will spend New Year’s Eve in solitary confinement, in Hong Kong’s high-security Stanley Prison.
Jimmy Lai is being nominated as Person of 2024 by some distinguished individuals, for whom he trumps the past and future American president.
First imprisoned exactly four years ago on New Year’s Eve, Lai is on trial under the National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing on July 1, 2020.
He is the most famous Chinese person to face court since the country’s leading public intellectual, Liu Xiaobo, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for “’inciting subversion of state power”. Liu was to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before dying, it was claimed from cancer, still incarcerated eight years later.
Lai could have left Hong Kong as the net closed in – just as Liu could have taken up one of numerous offers to work in the world’s leading universities. But Liu, who told me his life’s cause was to help mould a better future for China, insisted: “This is my country.”
Lai said similarly, when I interviewed him before the Hong Kong “troubles” began: “Hong Kong is now my home. It’s where my heart is. They leave me alone there.” No one can be left alone there any more, though. Especially not Lai.
Like so many before him, he had fled mainland China penniless, seeking his fortune in Hong Kong, aged 12. But once he succeeded, beyond his dreams, he never sought to leave.
And now it is almost inconceivable, as Lai fully understands, that he will ever be released under the Chinese Communist Party authorities who detest and fear him.
Nevertheless Lai, a stupendously successful clothing (Giordano) and then media billionaire, at 77 a year younger than Donald Trump, is contesting every claim made against him in the court that is presided over by three judges hand-picked by the regime, under the harsh new law that precludes juries.
Lai was denied his own choice of defending lawyer, King’s Counsel Timothy Owen, because the latter is a foreigner. Like Owen, Lai is also a British citizen.
In the recent past, former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the US’s libertarian Cato Institute have honoured Lai as Person of the Year or with special awards. Amnesty International recognises him as a “prisoner of conscience.”
This month Tina Brown, renowned British former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and Geremie Barmé, founder of the China Heritage website and celebrated alongside John Fitzgerald as the greatest Australian Sinologist, are among those who have lauded Lai as the outstanding figure of 2024.
But not all Australians are inclined to question Hong Kong’s new path. Four of the six foreign judges remaining on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal are Australian.
Brown notes that “Lai’s increasing commitment to the pro-democracy movement gradually took precedence over commercial success”, and is stunned by the claims that there are now 1800 political prisoners in Hong Kong – more even than in Russia.
Lai’s show trial began a year ago, and will resume on January 6.
He is facing two counts of “conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign countries or external elements”, and one count of “collusion with foreign countries or external elements”. He is also accused of conspiring to publish “seditious” materials.
The charges, which carry a potential life sentence, relate to articles in Apple Daily, the brash tabloid newspaper Lai founded and owned, to meetings with US politicians, to interviews with overseas media, and to Twitter (X) posts. Apple Daily has closed, with other troublemaking HK media.
The National Security Law evokes George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 with its thought crimes and Newspeak. But peak authoritarianism has never survived for long. Lai will prove ultimately “on the right side of history”, to repurpose a Marxist phrase often used by CCP leader Xi Jinping.
Lai is a tall – 185cm – father of six, a devout Roman Catholic convert, a deeply well-read autodidact. He has at times been brought into court in handcuffs and a chain around his waist – as if he were about to make a run for it, but essentially to underline publicly his subjugation, to please Hong Kong’s ultimate rulers 2000km to the north.
Among Lai’s most ardent public gallery supporters at court, alongside his wife, Teresa, is retired Cardinal Joseph Zen, about to turn 93, who had baptised him in 1997, the year of the HK handover.
Lai may be held alone, but he is in good company. Last month 45 democracy leaders were jailed for up to 10 years for conspiring to commit subversion. Their crime was to have conducted a primary election to select the best candidates to win legislature seats to challenge the executive government selected by Beijing.
Award-winning journalist and author Mark Clifford has recently published an acclaimed biography of Lai – The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.
Barmé says Lai is possessed, as was Liu Xiaobo, of “this sublime madness” that theologian Reinhold Niebuhr believed “so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks”, which mere idealistic liberalism – “too intellectual and too little emotional”, according to Niebuhr – can’t achieve.
Lai had told me: “The world is destroyed by people who have ideals more than by pragmatists. The dreamers … want to play God. And we all get into trouble then, because God is jealous.”
Barmé describes Niebuhr’s “sublime madness” as accepting that “when you stand with the oppressed, you get treated like the oppressed … Our struggle validates itself. History is littered with single individuals posing earthquake threats to totalitarian regimes. As Xi Jinping’s grip on power tightens, Jimmy Lai refuses to yield. That is why the CCP fears him. His courage matters”.
Rowan Callick is an Industry Fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.
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