Fortified by family and faith, Jimmy Lai won’t be cowed by Beijing’s bullying and menace

Alone in a tiny prison cell, the Hong Konger Beijing loathes more than any other marked Christmas for a third year in solitary confinement.

Jimmy Lai. Picture: AFP

Alone in a tiny prison cell in Hong Kong, a 76-year-old man on Monday marked a third Christmas in solitary confinement.

Before Jimmy Lai was made the most high-profile target of the Beijing-authored National Security Law, this was a time the entrepreneur turned democracy campaigner celebrated his two great pillars: his adoring family and his Catholic faith.

On Christmas Eve, the family and a few priests would come over for mass and a feast at Lai’s Kowloon house – the one that was firebombed in 2015 and again in 2019, and also once rammed by a stolen vehicle in an apparent attempt to intimidate the publisher.

“We’d have the whole family to the house and we’d have Malaysian food,” his son, Sebastien Lai, 29, tells The Australian in an interview in Taipei. “Mum would always want turkey and ham, but nobody would eat it on the day,” he recalls, laughing.

This year his father – the Chinese Communist Party’s most outspoken opponent in Hong Kong – was locked in a prison cell, only days into a three-month-long National Security Law trial UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron has denounced as “politically motivated prosecution”.

Lai’s high-profile trial began the week before Christmas, the first time in almost 1100 days he has been allowed out of the maximum-security prison in the south of Hong Kong island. The Hong Kong government has said it will allow the public to see how “bad” Lai’s alleged offences were.

Pointedly, the trial started the same day Chinese President Xi Jinping gave his end-of-year performance review in Beijing for Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee.

Like an approving schoolmaster, China’s strongman leader said he “fully approved” of Lee’s work in the city, praising him for “firmly defending national security”.

Xi said Lee had taken Hong Kong “from chaos to rule” and was now marching it “from rule to prosperity”.

Canberra is a lot less impressed with the crackdown on civic freedom in what was once one of the freest cities in Asia.

“The Australian government remains deeply concerned about the continuing erosion of Hong Kong’s rights, freedoms and autonomy,” a spokeswoman for Foreign Minister Penny Wong told The Australian.

“We have consistently raised our concerns about broad application of the National Security Law to arrest or pressure media organisations, civil society and pro-democracy figures, including Jimmy Lai.

“We urge authorities to uphold and protect Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, rule of law, and the rights and freedoms as guaranteed in the Basic Law and committed to under the Sino-British Joint Declaration.”

After meeting with Sebastien Lai in London days before the trial began, Lord Cameron said the National Security Law was a “clear breach” of the joint declaration agreed before Hong Kong was returned to China.

“I am gravely concerned that anyone is facing prosecution under the National Security Law, and particularly concerned at the politically motivated prosecution of British national Jimmy Lai,” he said.

“As a prominent and outspoken journalist and publisher, Jimmy Lai has been targeted in a clear attempt to stop the peaceful exercise of his rights to freedom of expression and association.

“I call on the Hong Kong authorities to end their prosecution and release Jimmy Lai.”

Foreign Secretary @David_Cameron met with Sebastien Lai in London today to listen to his concerns for his father, Jimmy Lai, detained in Hong Kong.

The UK opposes the National Security Law and will continue to stand by Jimmy Lai and the people of HK. pic.twitter.com/lhkoDWgJkj

— Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (@FCDOGovUK) December 12, 2023

Australian officials were in court to watch the opening of Lai’s trial, along with diplomats from the UK, US, Canada, European Union and other countries.

Retired Catholic cardinal Joseph Zen was also in the court. Zen, 91, who baptised the businessman in 1997, was himself charged under the National Security Law, although the Hong Kong authorities have not pursued the case.

The Vatican has been silent on Lai’s case, to the frustration of his friends, family and supporters.

“I don’t know what deal they have with China, but it’s obviously very disappointing,” Sebastien Lai said.

However, a group of senior Catholic leaders, including Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher, spoke out shortly before the trial about the persecution of the democracy advocate.

“There is no place for such cruelty and oppression in a territory that claims to uphold the rule of law and respect the right to freedom of expression,” Archbishop Fisher and his fellow senior Catholic leaders said in a joint statement.

“In standing up for his beliefs and committing himself through his faith to challenge autocracy and repression, Jimmy Lai has lost his business, been cut off from his family … He must be freed now.”

The Hong Kong government has bristled at the international criticism and ordered 1000 police officers to be stationed around the West Kowloon Court where the trial is expected to run for 80 days, resuming on January 2 after a holiday shutdown.

Jimmy Lai, who fled the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution for Hong Kong when he was 12, is accused of conspiring to collude with foreign forces under the made-in-Beijing 2020 National Security Law. Lee’s government has boasted about the 100 per cent conviction rate in National Security Law trials.

Lai has also been accused under a colonial-era law of conspiring to publish seditious material.

He has already been found guilty of unauthorised assembly (for “holding a candle and saying a prayer”, as his son puts it, to mark the Tiananmen Square massacre) and separately for a lease violation, which earned him an extraordinary jail sentence of five years and nine months.

The ongoing cases could see Lai sentenced to life in prison.

Sebastien says he is proud of his father, who is now being paraded in a “show trial”.

“He could have left at any point. He’s a British citizen. He could have been very comfortable somewhere else. But he decided to stay on principle and to stand for these freedoms and tell the Hong Kong government that the freedoms that he’s standing for are not up for trade,” he tells The Australian.

“You can’t buy him into silence.”

It is wrenching for his family. Teresa Lai, who introduced her husband to Catholicism, was in the court last week, dressed in black.

In one of the billionaire’s final interviews before he was sent to Stanley prison in late 2020, Lai said his 30-year commitment to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement had sprung from his Christian faith.

“If I go away, I not only give up my destiny, I give up God, I give up my religion, I give up what I believe in,” he told the Catholic News Agency. “I am what I am. I am what I believe. I cannot change it. And if I can’t change it, I have to accept my fate with praise.”

In his solitary prison cell, Lai reads books on Christian philosophy. He also draws religious pictures on lined paper using cheap pencils, which his prison guards have now banned from leaving his cell after some were published online having been sent in a letter to a supporter.

When he is allowed to by the Hong Kong authorities, Lai’s good friend and Catholic mentor, former cardinal Zen, visits him, a difficult trip for the nonagenarian.

Sebastien Lai says there is a “peace of mind” for his father despite his persecution by the Chinese Communist Party.

“Dad always had this good line that fear is the cheapest weapon an autocratic government has on its people. And he never cowed.”