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Mark L. Clifford, "The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic" (Free Press, 2024)
01:29:57
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Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format.
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Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6. Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hi and welcome to New Books in Human Rights, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Nicholas Becklin. I'm a human rights practitioner currently at Yale Law School and the host of this channel. Today I'm interviewing Mark Clifford, the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong foundation, about his new book the How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident and China's most feared Critic Jimmy Lai is perhaps the most high profile Chinese political prisoner today, having spent almost five years in solitary confinement after being charged under the draconian National Security Law introduced in Hong Kong by Beijing in 2020. Jimmy Lai's life and fate very much mirror the trajectory of Hong Kong itself, from its astounding economic success to the increasingly desperate struggle of its citizens to defend their freedoms and way of life following China's reassertion of its sovereignty over the former British colony in 1997. Marx journalistic career spans several decades and he has been the editor in chief of both the South China and Morning Post and the Standard, the two English language newspaper in Hong Kong. He also holds a PhD in Hong Kong History from the University of Hong Kong and is the author of another book on Hong Kong published in 2022 today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World what China's Crackdown Reveals about Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere. With that, let's jump into the interview. I hope you enjoy the show. Mark, welcome to the show.
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B
Thanks. Great to be here.
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C
Mark, I wanted to start by asking you a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, how you become interested in journalism, how you ended up in Asia and in Hong Kong.
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B
Yeah, well, I'm an American. I grew up in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts and went to went all the way west to California, to Berkeley where I got my undergraduate degree in history, came back to New York, worked in business and financial journalism before I was lucky enough to get a fellowship at Columbia University, a Bagehot Fellowship named after the legendary 19th century editor of the Economist magazine and spent a year there. Had quit my job at Forbes to do the fellowship and was looking to go abroad, had never been to Asia and was hired more or less site unseen by Philip Bowring and Derek Davies at the Far Eastern Economic Review. They shipped me off to Korea. I kind of vaguely knew where Korea was on the map, but I remember when they, they mentioned the job. I got a huge map on my wall at home in my apartment in New York and I kind of ran my finger all the way along the coast of, of China, of East Asia and found Korea a lot farther north than I had kind of imagined and went off to Korea in 1987. I got there eight days before the student demonstrations of of June 87, which really ushered in the the modern era democracy in Korea. They started eight days after I got there. So it was a pretty, pretty great, pretty Great introduction to, to a guy who's like, kind of became an accidental Asia person. Right.
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C
And then at some point you move to Hong Kong and you start working in journalism there and you become the editor, the publisher of one of the two English language newspapers, the Standard, and then you treacherously cross to the South China Morning Post at some point.
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B
Yeah, that. Well, I spent five great years in Korea and again, I think this, this is one reason I'm so optimistic, or I was so optimistic about China and the possibilities for change. I saw democracy develop in South Korea. It went from more or less a military dictatorship to a pretty open, or at least on the path to an open democracy. In the late 80s, early 90s, Taiwan had been under martial law. When I moved to Asia, it started a flourishing democracy. And then Hong Kong, of course, was so free. And I, I came down there, I spen climate first at the Far Eastern Economic Review, then Business Week, then as you said, the Standard, and made the treacherous crossing to the South China Morning Post, later worked for the Asia Business Council. So I got to, you know, really spread my wings and go all the way to the Gulf. I'd been covering all of Asia, I was lucky, but all of Asia through, through the subcontinent, through, from Japan to Indonesia to, to India. And met Jimmy Lai very, very early on the subject of our, of our, of my latest book and of our conversation today. And Jimmy was a successful businessman who had just gone into the media business. And yes, I've been lucky enough to know him for 30 plus years.
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C
So at that time, Hong Kong is a British colony. Since I think 1984, it's been clear that Hong Kong would be handed over back to China. There are years of negotiations and China and the UK agree on what is called a joint declaration that promises 50 years of a system that would protect some of the specificities of Hong Kong political, judicial system as well as his way of life. I think that's the language in the joint declaration. But of course, 1989 and the Tiananmen crackdown on the spring democracy movement happens. And that really is a turning point for the population in Hong Kong, which was until then seen very much as an apolitical population that was just happy to have escaped Communist China and was trying to make a living or a fortune in Hong Kong. Is that the general background against which you sort of land in Hong Kong?
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B
Yeah, no, very, very well put. So I came in June 1992. So it was a month before the last governor, Chris Patton arrived. It was almost three years to the day after The Tiananmen Square killings, well, killings all over China of hundreds, probably thousands of Chinese by their own government. And it was also though a few months after the, the then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had made his so called Southern tour where he, after, you know, the post Tiananmen gloom dung had told people, go out, get rich, let's get the economy juiced up again. And so people in Hong Kong, the business community was feeling very, very optimistic, but people were obviously very concerned. It was five years, as you say, millions of them and their parents and grandparents had fled China, had fled Maoist Communist China and the famines, the political persecutions. Now China was coming to them and a couple years earlier had had the Tiananmen killing. So it's very, very, you know, interesting for a journalist, but fraught time. The Hong Kong people, as you say, the, the reputation had always been that they political. In fact, research is, is showing now that, I mean there was so much more going on beneath the surface. But a combination of British colonial administration and real opposition by the Chinese Communist Party working behind the scenes had damped down the political aspirations of the people of Hong Kong, which really had been there since, since 1945 and the end of World War II. But it took Tiananmen and the Tiananmen killings. Well, the Tiananmen spring of democracy went 500,000 or more people came out in the streets in support of the students, in support of democracy in China. It had taken that intense political activity of spring of 1989 for those political aspirations to come to the fore. And then kind of the genie was out of the bottle. Chris Patton came, he was determined to, and I think with the support of the Prime Minister John Major, to, excuse me, really make up in way too late for the fact that the Brits had not brought any kind of political openness, let alone democracy to Hong Kong before that time. So Patton was trying to make up for lost time in these last five years before the handover. He was trying to take the Chinese seriously, taking their promises, taking them at their word. The 1984 Joint Declaration, as you said, promised Hong Kong's continued way of life, its continued freedoms, its openness. Even though there was, wasn't democracy, there was free speech, there were all sorts of freedoms that we take for granted in open societies. And so it was a real push pull because obviously China didn't, didn't want there to be more, you know, even, well, certainly didn't want there to be more freedom.
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C
And what is, I think fascinating with your book on Jimmy Lai is that Jimmy's life really is a fresco, historical fresco of both China and Hong Kong from basically the 50s, even if he moves to Hong Kong only in 61, if I remember correctly. But his father has moved there in the 50s. He's worked as a porter at the Guangzhou Railway station. So seeing people from Hong Kong coming and then, you know, it sort of rides the wave of the economic boom of Hong Kong in the 70s and 80s and then, you know, 89 and the turning political points and then there'll be the handover in 97 and then this whole entire period that I think from 97 to 2020, when you have, you know, Beijing is sort of trying to assert more control. But I think the plan is basically have a political party in Hong Kong that wins the majority of the votes, the dab. And so that if there are elections of the chief executive, they are guaranteed the result and this will be one of their men or women. But because of the lack of quality, let's put it this way, of the successive chief executive, Cy Tong, Donald Zhang, Cy Lan and so on, the Hong Kongers are never sold to the pro Beijing parties. And so at some point Beijing realizes that there is no way they can hold to their promise to give universal suffrage to Hong Kong. And then they find a way to get around it, which is basically to take back the promise and just hand pick the candidates that the electorate would vote for, which triggers the mass demonstration. But before we get into this, I really want to focus on Jimmy Lai and how he rides this entirely historical period, how this mirror the history of Hong Kong, evolution of China, Hong Kong relations. And we have to start with his childhood. I mean, his childhood is the stuff of novels. I mean, this is absolutely extraordinary, the resourcefulness that he has as, as a young kid. I think he's reselling cigarettes when he's six year old, is working as a porter in a station. With his nine, he escapes on his own and 12. And you have to tell the circumstances of how he got a permit to go to Macau and so on. So tell us a little bit about the childhood of Jimmy Lai in China and his beginnings in Hong Kong.
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B
Yeah, well, I mean, you're right, he is a fresco or a tableau of modern Chinese Hong Kong history. It's extraordinary. And as I was writing the book, I was thinking, I mean, who's going to believe this? It sounds like I'm making this up. It's some kind of like, yeah, it's a novel of some sort. I mean, he's born two or three years and nobody's exactly sure, but we think he was born in 1947. I mean it was so chaotic, there are no birth records. I mean the family was completely, completely unable to find them. But he had a twin sister and he had an older sister who was mentally a bit challenged. And it's even a more complicated Chinese family though. Mother was a peasant who was the second wife and brought into a rich family. Very, very complicated family history. And as you said, the father went off to Hong Kong shortly after the Maoist revolution. Both parents got permission to leave, but only on condition that they left their children. And so I mean you think of the cruelty, the barbarity of a government like that. The mother stayed behind, she said, I'm not leaving my kids. The father left and so that left Jimmy, his twin sister and this older sister who couldn't really fend for herself as well. The mother was in and out of. Jimmy always called them labor camps, but technically they weren't because it was some kind of forced work situation. But she was able to come home on weekends. But you think about it, these two twins, they're four years old, their sister's six, they're trying to fend for themselves. You think of these four year old kids, I mean neighbors help them out a bit. The mother would bring home some burned rice at the end of the week to feed them. She was treated like a class enemy, forced to wear a dunces cap, kneel on glass during periodic periods of political struggle. And Jimmy, as you said, he was a hustler. It's interesting because he has a twin. We can, we can kind of have a compare and contrast. His sister Cy had a photographic memory. She breezed through school, she could look at a page, just memorize it. Jimmy struggled even in, he never finished primary school. He was, he had to repeat a couple of grades. As you said, he was a street hustler. He's picking up old cigarette butts, re rolling tobacco, selling them, you know, stealing stuff, scrap metal, selling it, all sorts of black market activities. I mean to the extent a six or eight or nine year old kid can be in the black market. Then made it on to being a porter at the Guangzhou, the old Canton railway station. Also a kind of triad, mafia crime controlled situation. But as you say, he came into contact with people from Hong Kong and one day a guy gave him a tip and then reached in his pocket, found a half eaten bar of chocolate, gave it to Jimmy. It's a time of extreme hunger in China. Jimmy ate the chocolate and it was like his head exploded. And he said, where are you from? Hong Kong. Wow, okay, I got to go to Hong Kong. They got this stuff called chocolate there. And he gets up a one way. He gets a permit to Macau, but as you say, the circumstances. So his house is. They, they, they're. It's a rich family, but the house has been split up with lots of other people now living in various rooms after the communist revolution. And there was a guy who worked for the government who I think in customs, but anyway, we're a government official. He wanted Jimmy to spy on his girlfriend and report if she's seen anybody else. And so Jimmy, you know, did what, did what the guy asked him to do and, and got a visa to Macau in return. And his mother, he took him by his telling, 10 months before his mother would let him, would agree to let him go to Macau. And I was thinking, it took me quite a while when I was working on this book. I mean, I've known Jimmy for 30 years. But one of the problems of writing a biography of somebody who's in solitary confinement is you can't hear from him, you can't check things out. I wanted to ask him like, why did your mother let you go? And what. I'm pretty sure of this. His mother let him go because it was during the Great Leap Forward, during a famine that killed maybe as many as 45 million people in China. You think that 45 million people. I think his mother was afraid he was going to starve to death if he stayed. And so she agreed to let him go to Macau. From there he smuggled himself on a smuggling boat into. Crammed with, he said 40, 50, 60, 80 people. He's used a lot of different numbers in talking about this over the years. But smuggled into Hong Kong had his. His mother, his aunt's address. His mother's sister finds her. She and her husband are living in. In this informal housing in shanty town of which there, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were living in these kind of places in Hong Kong. Men. The place was so small, there wasn't even room for Jimmy to sleep on the floor. So she finds him a job in a glove making factory in Sham Shui Po. And the first night he sleeps on the factory floor. And he. And he goes from sleeping on a factory floor l. Factory to 15 years later owning a factory five years after that. It was the biggest sweater maker in. In Hong Kong, if not in asia.
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C
He is 12 year old.
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B
Yes, sorry, he's tweet 1212 and a half or say, yeah, he arrives in.
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C
Hong Kong, he thinks that he's going to find, you know, paradise, and instead he finds himself in a slum, really, because, you know, hundreds of thousands of people have. So the British had this policy that they call the touch base policy, which is that if you manage to, by any means, go down to Hong Kong to a certain latitude, then you would be accepted as an immigrant to Hong Kong. If you were caught before that, you would be sent to China with often very serious consequences because the Communist government did not look, you know, kindly on people trying to, to escape the, the regime.
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B
Yeah, I, I, I, I do have to, I've, I do have to correct you a little bit. At least in Jimmy's telling, of course, decades later, it wasn't, it wasn't a capitalist hell when he got there. It was paradise. Because the first morning he wakes up and he smells food. He smells congee, rice, cooking buns, you know, flour, dough. And so for him, this was heaven. I mean, the freedom to eat, that was freedom for him. And then, of course, the freedom to work, as you say, working this glove factory, it was tough. He's lost his hearing a lot, much of his hearing in one ear because the conditions are so noisy. Lost a fingertip in an accident. And one of those factors, I mean, he was a, you know, he was, if we looked at it from today, say he's an exploited teenage, you know, exploited child worker. But for him it was, it was freedom, it was liberation.
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C
He has these quotes that you report in the book Food Is Freedom. And it's very touching because you can see when you escape from a country where there isn't enough food, of course, finding a place where there is food and certainly choice feels like freedom. But it's also tragic because he is now in prison. He's been there for three years, is in solitary confinement. And there's very little choice of food in Hong Kong prison.
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B
Yeah, I know. I mean, it's actually, it's coming up this, in December, it'll be five years. So, you know, we're talking about, you know, it's close to 1-800 days, mostly in solitary confinement. He doesn't get to choose. I mean, it is, as you say, very ironic. He found freedom in Hong Kong. He stayed in Hong Kong because he wanted to celebrate and stand up for that freedom. And now he's in a situation he, as you say, he can't choose what he eats, he can't choose when he eats. He doesn't really choose where he eats it's his cell. But he's in a situation. I think we can talk about this later. I think he's found freedom in a certain sense, but he certainly doesn't have physical freedom, he doesn't have material freedom.
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C
So as you say, he's so resourceful, ingenious, street smart, that from, you know, Aaron boy at the glove factory, he manages to become one of the manager and then when he's 21 year old, he owns a factory. And at that time, China doesn't export much directly. And I think there is a system between the US and Hong Kong with quotas for export of textile, which will be a significant source of also economic growth for Hong Kong. And basically Jimmy sort of feeds into this, this, this growth, but in a spectacularly successful fashion. Can you tell us a little bit and tell us about his business acumen and how he sort of manages to, you know, expand the business up to, you know, the gcpney, you know, contract Comitex and up to Giordano and then Giordano is its own chapter, I think.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just thing. It's. I've met, yeah, Hundreds or more business people during my career as a business and financial reporter. And you don't meet many like Jimmy, just on the business side. Yeah, he started, he really worked from the fact, from the floor up, up, literally as, as we've discussed. And he knew every aspect about production. And then when he started his sweater factory, it was really tough going for a while. And so he was very involved in trying to get every efficiency he could out of these. You know, it wasn't a modern factory, bought a bank, bankrupt old factory with old equipment and tried to sell to U.S. manufacturers. And so he's always working on efficiencies. But he's an extraordinary, extraordinarily charismatic, compelling person. So he's also a great salesperson. So first of all, as a salesperson, because he knew every aspect of the business, he could quote prices like instantly. You just knew. The whole, the whole supply chain knew everything. But he also had brilliant ideas. Lots of times you'd get, you get stuck with like too many orange, too many green sweaters. But everybody wants to buy orange sweaters. So he said, let's not dye, let's not make these things, the green sweaters and the orange sweaters, let's make them as white sweaters. And when the orders come in, we'll dye them green or we'll dye them orange. Whatever people are buying that year now, the quality is maybe not quite as good as if you use the green, green yarn as opposed to dyeing it later. But it's good enough. And so that saved, that meant that wastage went down, which meant that retailers could sell more. They sell more at full price, fewer items on sale. It meant the delivery times were faster. And Jimmy was always working on speeding up delivery time. I mean, now we've, we're into this almost instant world. But it was Jimmy who pioneered the use of chartering planes to send sweaters and shirts to huge US customers like the Limited. He was sending 747 cargo planes to Columbus, Ohio, filled with, with merchandise. Before that, they'd gone on a ship, they'd taken five, six weeks. You know, it would take five or six months, this turnaround, between the time an order was placed and the time that it actually got into the stores. And Jimmy cut that dramatically. And so, I mean, I had people at the Limited tell me, you know, they bought their houses off the innovations that Jimmy made.
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C
The tech.
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B
You mentioned the textile quotas. You could only send a certain amount of goods made of, let's say, cotton. So Jimmy said, let's find a fabric that's like cotton. So he used Rami, which is, you know, a similar, and it's natural fiber, but it's not cotton. And so the, all of a sudden he could send more of these shirts in at a cheaper price because he didn't have to pay for quotas, which, you know, is a kind of modified tariff. So, you know, innovation after innovation after innovation, cutting the time to market, improving the quality. You know, it's just, just an extraordinary businessman. And you know, again, Dec, I talked to people who worked with him in the 70s and they said, you know, there were lots and lots of great people in Hong Kong in the 1970s in that business. But Jimmy Lai stood out. He, you give him a sample, he'd go to the factory, he'd work all night. You say goodnight to you at 10 o' clock at night, 9 o' clock the next morning, be there with a sample. He was a really hard working, really smart, really innovative thinker and he has.
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C
A big break going to New York, right? You tell this episode, the holidays are.
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A
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B
Well, I, I think you're, you're thinking of when he started reading more about, well, Hayek in particular, who, who's Qu. He was complaining about the Chinese, of course. They, they'd wrecked his family, they'd wrecked his country. And one night after dinner, guy says, you know, you should read a little more so you really know what you're talking about. And he reached over his dinner host and, and pulled, pulled down a copy of Hayek's Road to Serfdom. And so that Jimmy is one of these people who doesn't have a formal education and has been spent decades in a way trying to make up for. He's a voracious reader. Just sucks up. Ide started, started reading Hayek later met Milton Friedman, became a, almost a libertarian in his thinking. I mean, like many business people, he doesn't like government. You know, government controls or, or you know, government stopping him from doing things. And so he adopted this kind of radical free market philosophy which was very much in line with, with where Hong Kong was at the time and.
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C
From selling textile to brands abroad. At some point he decides that he can do it himself. And he set up this very successful chain of apparel called Giordano, which he says was a good Italian sounding name. He had been to a restaurant I think that was called Giordano. I said that we. And you know, Victoria, Tim Boha was writing in a review of your books that she grew up in a working class family in the 60s and they were very poor and if they were going to shops and you know, they would be treated very poorly because they clearly didn't have the means to buy what was on display. And so they would be, you know, Treated poorly and being kicked out. But when Giordano opens, then, you know, you were welcome. Everybody was welcome. You could go, you could browse, you were not hard pressed to buy. And I find it really interesting because when I was living in Hong Kong and if you stepped in at Giordano, you had a lot of domestic helpers from the Philippines and from Indonesia who kind of got the same treatment from many shops in Hong Kong. Sort of look down that, you know, people did not have many memes. But at Giordano, you know, they were treated like regular customers and it was good business because they were buying a lot of things and, you know, sending back to their, their families back home. But Giordano was a. Was an enormous business success. Is that right?
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B
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, thanks for mentioning that, that wonderful review by Victoria Tinboro Hoy and, and I was really. Yeah, I learned a lot from it. And I think she captured the ethos of Jordan. I mean, there had been these high end, more or less British department stores and there were like, you know, street hawker, you know, very, very modest, you know, one off kind of proprietors would run the store. And so Jimmy started a chain and because he brought what he knew about supply chain efficiencies about these things I talked about, you know, you, you make them in white and you dye them in whatever color people are buying. He cut the. I mean, we talked before, it might take five months for something to get to America. And then he cut it to maybe five or six weeks. Well, with Giordano, because it's in Hong Kong, he cut it to around five days. And so he invested in technology. So you had. It was, you know, 1980s, it's not what we have today, but the very early, with point of sale technology, knowing, you know, by the minute what people were buying, what color, what style. And he gave, it's very interesting, he gave people the illusion that there was all this choice in a Giordano, all these bright colors, these different shirts and casual clothes, like smart casual. And in fact, there weren't really that many different items. There were just different colors. The display was great, but it was mostly the colors. They were bright. And as you said, people were treated well. That wasn't an accident. Jimmy invested heavily in service. He paid his employees much more than competing other store clerks would get other retail chains. And he trained them and he really spent money on training. So it's interesting, you think of me as this kind of, you know, Hayekian, you know, very, you know, almost libertarian, free market guy. But he wasn't, he didn't do it at the expense of his staff. I mean, he treated his staff. And I can say this from my time when I was working as a board director at Next Digital, he really treated staff well, both in a personal sense and in a financial and kind of compensation sense. And I think that showed, as you say, whether you're a humble domestic helper from the Philippines or a working class person from the housing estates in Hong Kong or you're, you're a banker. They, you know, you know, you know, who's obviously affluent. Everybody shopped there, they treated everybody well. And I think that that says a lot about Jimmy. I just have to add one more thing about Giordano. Most people listening to this will know of Uniqlo, the the J. The incredibly successful Japanese retailer. Well, Tadashi and I guy owes a lot of his business success to Jimmy. What he did with Uniqlo was to take a lot of the, the precepts, the concepts that Jimmy pioneered. He came down. He spent a lot of time with Jimmy in Hong Kong in the early 1980s and, and gives Jimmy credit for it and offered for Jimmy to, to be his partner as he was growing Uniqlo. And Jimmy didn't want to do it, doesn't regret not doing it. And I have to say Tadashi Yanai is a businessman of a different sort. He could scale in a way that I don't think Jimmy was ever really interested in. Jimmy would start ideas, you know, started businesses and then would kind of move on to the next thing. But it's important to realize that that for better or worse, Fast Fashion kind of has its roots with Jimmy Lai and Giordano and other other entrepreneurs in, in Hong Kong at that time.
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C
It's fascinating. So Giordano becomes extremely successful and make Jimmy extremely wealthy. Giordano expands to the mainland China mainland and then everything's going well. I don't know how political Jimmy is. He's clearly a very independent, free thinker. But there is no great evidence of political engagement at the time. But then happened and it seems that it's a big turning point in his life because most of the tycoons, most of the connected business class in Hong Kong who made their fortune thanks to their connection with mainland businesses and mainland government really distanced themselves and tried to be as apolitical as possible if they were not just endorsing the Chinese government and peddling these arguments about the need for China to have stability and the protest of being engineered by black hands from abroad and so on and so forth. And Jimmy really takes a different path. It's a fork in the road in his life. Did you find out why in writing this book?
- [37:05]
B
Yeah, well, I mean it's, it's interesting. Even the people that know Jimmy best don't know. Oh well, there are people, as I said I talked to who knew him back in the 70s and 80s. But most people, as you say, it's a big fork in the road after the Tiananmen killings. And Jimmy became, I don't want to say became a different person, but it seems before that he was very up. Well, even after he was very optimistic about China opening up economically. The Deng Xiaoping reforms that started around 1980 and slowly opened up the economy, opened up China during the 1980s were something he was so hopeful about. He started manufacturing cometech, started manufacturing goods for that was his manufacturing company, started manufacturing in China or Giordano for the limited, for Polo, many companies. And Jimmy was apparently super optimistic about the prospects that economic reform would lead to social and political reform. And then came the 1989 killings. And he still believed in it, but he thought that media would push it along. And it's ironic because he had been gotten a little bored with Giordano. I think the company had gone public by then or was about to go public. And as you say, he'd become a very wealthy man. Company was throwing off large amounts of cash to, to him every year and others and but as I said, China, he was really optimistic about China. China Resources, a state owned company, a so called red chip which is listed in Hong Kong was owned 30% of Comtex. He wasn't seen as anti communist, on the contrary, very really hopeful about where China was going. Maybe he was anti communist, but very pro China. So after Tiananmen he, he. Well, sorry. So he had wanted to get into the restaurant business, into the food business and it was. And he's going to take his ideas of Giordano which is to give the consumer illusion of all this choice, the illusion to do different things, to mix and match, make whatever dish you want, but not really have that many ingredients. Again, always thinking as a businessman. It's very similar to what Chipotle did with Mexican food. That was they started in the early 1990s. So a few years later, so thinking about going to the food business, we know he's, you know, obsessed with food. And then Tiananmen comes and he says forget he saw cnn, we forget satellite tv, cnn. The broadcasting of Tiananmen almost in real time was something unprecedented. In human history. Later that year, the Berlin Wall falls, also in real time. And Jimmy didn't wait for the Berlin Wall to fall. But after Tiananmen, he said, I'm going into media. I'm going to do a magazine magazine. And people said, what do you know about media? He goes, I read Time, I read the Economist, I read Fortune, I can do this. Real entrepreneurial confidence starts this magazine, Next Magazine. It quickly becomes the number one or number two magazine in Hong Kong. Incredibly successful, and again, really listened to the consumers, gave people what they wanted, very approachable. And when I met him in 1993, he walked me through what he was going to do with a newspaper, and that became Apple Daily two years later. So if it hadn't been for Tiananmen, we'd probably have this fantastic Chinese food chain, which would be nice, but there are a lot of other Chinese restaurants, a lot of Chinese food, a lot of good Chinese food. But there's only one Apple Daily, only one Next magazine, and really only one Jimmy Lai. So he again, let's give the context. He starts next in 1990, starts Apple in 1995. Hong Kong is about to go over to the. To the Chinese in 1997. He starts in. In the face of the Chinese coming to take over Hong Kong because he believes that freedom, freedom of information, freedom of business, free markets, that's gonna. That's gonna be a force that's gonna sweep away the Chinese Communist Party.
- [41:03]
C
And the interesting thing is that he manages to shake up the media environment in Hong Kong, which until then was. Was pretty stale and control with a lot of mainland controlled newspapers and then some sort of British, more classic ones. But the entire distribution of newspaper was, and I assume still is controlled by the triads. And that creates quite a bit of difficulties for him for distributing magazines and newspapers that is very critical of the Mainland. Not only that, but also I think you characterize it as a scandal. Sex and skin. These are very tabloidy. It's a combination between tabloids as well, and sometimes very aggressive tabloids. Very invasive in the privacy of the Hong Kong pop stars and politicians and others, and people victims of tragedies, personal tragedies. But it also hires these excellent opinion writers who really contribute to the debate in Hong Kong. So it's a strange mix. How does he manage these different tensions and what kind of team does he assemble around him to do that? And how do you get involved then and become one of the directors?
- [42:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. He's a big concept guy and Some of the time he's really, really, really hands on. But a lot of the time, especially with something like a daily newspaper, I mean, we had 4,000 people at the peak in Taiwan and in Hong Kong. And so he basically hired good people, kind of band of R like Abraham Lincoln did. I mean, it's with a lot more people, kind of let people do their thing. He even hired people close to Beijing just to have different voices. So. And he. Hong Kong was pretty small place at seven million, seven and a half million people, probably closer to six and a half when he started. And he wanted to be everything to everybody. A lot of the magazines, everything had been very specialized. And he said, I'm gonna, I'll give you the sex, I'll give you the skin, I'll give you the scandal. I'm also going to give you free market economic comics. I'm going to give you pro democracy viewpoints. I'll be something for everybody. I'm going to do it in a really nice package. In 1995, he started publishing in color again. This goes back to his issue about investing in quality, investing in people, investing in good technology. He got the best color presses he could get. He's like world class presses. I mean, this is a time when almost no newspaper in the world was publishing in color. And he went full color. So of course, he just woke up. As you said, it's a very sleepy Hong Kong media, media scene. You know, there were a lot, there's lots of political control. You were Beijing allied or the British colonial government was leaning on you. You didn't, you didn't rock the boat. You were kind of part of the establishment. Jimmy was an outsider. He wasn't part of clubs. He wasn't, he wasn't schmoozing with, you know, with rich people, with other rich people, politicians. He's kind of a shy, loner kind of person. And he again, he has such confidence in himself, in his vision. He felt that he was a Hong Kong Hong or he hired lots of great Hong Kongers. He hired the best investigative reporters he could find. He found he hired the best of everybody. He, you know, had, you know, as you said, top economic and political commentators. And, you know, he did it, but it wasn't like, oh, you gotta eat your spinach. It was like, I'm gonna give this to you in a really nice package. Color photos, huge, big headlines, you know, a really approachable newspaper. And before that, a very, very approachable magazine. And so, so, you know, he was somebody you couldn't ignore. And you talked about a fork in the road. He was really gutsy. Even before Apple started. Back in 1994, he got so mad when the premier, Li Peng, went to Europe. And Li Peng, known as the Butcher of Beijing, very involved with, you know, was carried out the Tiananmen massacre on behalf of Deng Xiaoping and part of a coup that saw Zhao Jiang, the former premier, ousted. And Li Peng went to Germany, went to Europe. It was the first trip by a state leader since the Genan killings. Jimmy was so mad and he wrote this, you know, scathing column, taking it, you know, trashing Lee Pung and the Communist Party, Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese. You mentioned that Jordano had stores in Bay or a store in Beijing, stores in the mainland. The authorities shut the store. They said there were health and safety violations and the permitting wasn't right. Oh, we all know was political retaliation. Jimmy said, I don't care. You know, he wrote another column a month or so later. He said, I'm sorry, I used some very bad language. I was rude, but I mean it. And he doubled down on his attacks on the Chinese Communist Party, even though he knew it would hurt him badly financially. And he actually ended up having to sell Giordano, his stake in Giordano. A couple years later, he walked away to about $200 million. And he poured that into Apple Daily. So again and again, again, when he was pressed by the Chinese, he would double down. I mean, he's, you know, we have to remember he has this confidence from having come up from nothing, from being a starving 12 year old who came to Hong Kong, who became one of the most successful business people in, in post war Hong Kong, if not post war Asia. So he believed in himself. He believed, no matter what you do to me, I can come back as strong or stronger than ever. And that's, that's how he approached the media. Media.
- [47:06]
C
And we have now to sort of zoom back to the larger dynamic of Hong Kong and China. So 1997, the Brits hand over Hong Kong to China. China appoints another tycoon who did not become a tycoon on his own. In inherited a big shipping company from his father. And in the beginning, there's not a lot that changed. I think it's fair to say, even if there are worrying signs and it is a bit of a different period for Jimmy, I think we can go quickly over it. But he has a second marriage. He converts to Catholicism. He tried to start an E commerce company. He has what he says a midlife crisis. I think you Quote him saying, I had a midlife crisis and I lost more than $100 million. He tries out all sorts of ideas which were kind of too early for his time. Set up box for TV over Internet, virtual reality, an animation studio for Muse. That worked a little bit better. And it moves to Taiwan in the early 2000s. Replicate the success of the media empire in Taiwan. Apple Daily. Taiwan becomes a big newspaper selling half a million. It tries TV but got sort of kicked out by basically a cartel of TV in Taiwan. But this is sort of in between, period. The next big fork in the road really is the 2014 Umbrella Movement. This really starts with, is a plan to oppose legislation that would clearly for Hong Kong people, open a way for Beijing to clamp down on traditional political and civil freedom in Hong Kong. Why is there so much anxiety among the general Hong Kong population about this piece of legislation?
- [49:50]
B
Let me just back up a little bit and say I, I'd say you're absolutely right. The first years after 1997 and the Chinese takeover, China, at least on the surface, really did try to keep up with this one country, two systems phrase that they had. And, and Apple Daily and Next were very focused on Hong Kong. They didn't really write a lot about China. It was very domestic. It was, you know, lots of scandals, lots of investigative reporting. And then in 2003, the first really worrying legislation came in. It was national security legislation. And that would have allowed for a big clampdown. And because the opposition political forces were quite fragmented, I mean deliberately as a result of British and Chinese policy, Apple Daily and Jimmy became Next magazine, became a kind of lightning rod, became like the major opposition force and rallying people. And 500,000 people came out in the streets in 2003 to oppose this legislation. And so I think Article 23, Article 23 and Article 23 refers to the Basic Law which was the mini constitution that China imposed on Hong Kong in 1990. In many ways it was great. As you mentioned, the Sino British Declaration, these are the two, two key documents we look at Sino British Declaration in 1984 where Britain agrees to hand Hong Kong back to China in 1997. And then this, this basic law in 1990, fantastic promises on paper. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of, you know, assembly, everything, Freedom of press, of course, rule of law. And, but in that there was some so called Article 23 which said that Hong Kong, Kong must on its own legislate a law that will protect, you know, national security, China's national security. And it was clear when it came out that it would be a way for Hong Kong, for the government to clamp down on Hong Kong freedoms. And so Jimmy and Next and Apple led the charge and a half a million people came out. It was certainly the largest demonstration since the handover, and the largest other than One of the one or several, the marches in 1989 in support of the Tiananmen students. So all of a sudden, it's clear to the government that Jimmy Lai is a political threat. He can get a half a million people out on the streets. You know, where a big demonstration in the past, that if you got 50,000, it would be huge. He gets a half a million people on a sweltering July day. But then Jimmy, as you said, he was focused more on Taiwan. He was starting all these other businesses. He just wasn't that engaged. And he was getting older. And then. Then Fast forward to 2014, and it was really led by the students and Jimmy and others were. I know Jimmy was ready to step back. But again, Apple and Next were caught up in these events and became the major cheerleaders and were just an important catalyst for getting people out in the streets. And 2014 was extraordinary. For 79 days from late September through early December, December, thousands, tens of thousands of people camped out in three different places in. In Hong Kong, notably in the. On the edge of the central business district, right outside the government headquarters in Admiralty. And, you know, and right outside the People's Liberation army base right there. And PLA was quite proper. The Hong Kong government eventually ended this. And, you know, the encampment ended there. Jimmy and a few other people were arrested. But again, again, Apple Daily was really at the forefront of the opposition. So I think the government had never liked Jimmy from the days when he was writing about Lee Peng in 1994, and they eventually forced him to sell Giordano. But the fact that you could have this kind of large scale political mobilization against the Hong Kong government was something the Chinese Communist Party, I think, was just incredibly alarmed about. Instead of trying to deal with the demands, which really were the demands to live up to the basic law, to live up to the promises that China had made, to live up to the promise that Hong Kong people could elect their own mayor, elect their own city council, I mean, that was really what it was about. Just let leave Hong Kong alone. Keep your promises. For Hong Kong to keep its way of life for at least 50 years, Beijing couldn't do that.
- [54:23]
C
And also, the Hong Kong government has its share of responsibility. The trust that the Hong Kong people had for the authorities was really broken. The government mishandled a large number of concerns that the population had, anything from socioeconomic concerns to historical preservation to introducing reform that I think some of them Beijing didn't even ask for, but the officials wanted to, to sort of be in the good graces of their masters in Beijing wanted to implement. And so you really see a situation where the Hong Kong government doesn't know exactly what Beijing wants, but it also doesn't want to address and doesn't have the political means to address the demands of the Hong Kong population. And this situation just snowballs and the distrust and the antagonism between the two sides just gets higher and higher. And then we progressively get to a situation where China feels that it needs to introduce a radical measure, which is the National Security Law. And before that, just before that, Jimmy Lai, as well as a number of democratic figures, democratic parties. There are a number of democratic parties in Hong Kong who keep winning elections despite a heavily unfavorable electoral system against them. But they have the popular vote. They undertake really a campaign to bring international attention to the situation in Hong Kong and the erosion of freedom and the risks to Hong Kong freedoms, including what will become a very controversial trip to the US during the first Trump administration of, of which Jimmy Lai is part of, along with other senior democratic figures such as Martin Lee and others. Can you walk us through this period up to the introduction of the National Security Law?
- [57:09]
B
Yeah, well, we stopped talking a few minutes ago about 2014. What they called the Umbrella movement, Occupy Central it was called sometimes. And that ended the 79 day occupation, ended peacefully. But there was a, it, it didn't really end. There was this low level simmer, this boiling because Beijing was increasingly making, making it clear that it was not going to live up to its promises. It wasn't going to let the people of Hong Kong elect their mayor, elect their city council. I, I want to get back and underscore something you said much earlier in, in this discussion, which is Beijing thought that it could get Hong Kong people to support its candidates. The dab Democratic alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, a pro Beijing did a lot of grassroots work and probably a third or quarter, a third of people would support them, but they weren't going to win popular elections. But Beijing, I think didn't really have good on the ground intelligence in Hong Kong. It didn't really understand that Hong Kong people were not going to be a threat to China. But they wanted to be left alone, they wanted to be free. But Beijing started getting Increasingly agitated that Hong Kong wasn't coming under its control as much as it would have liked. And so 2014 ended. But Beijing's assertion of complete control over Hong Kong didn't end. And so you had things on a low level boil until the summer of 2019 when and the government, again the Hong Kong government mismanaged things and tried to introduce a law that would have allowed for extradition to China. And that had the business community as well as political activists very concerned. Because if you had so many business people, had operations or joint ventures in China and what if your business partner got mad at you and got a local judge to say that you should be extradited to China where you weren't going to have justice?
- [59:08]
C
So this is a, and let's remember that there was even people abducted in Hong Kong and brought forcibly to the mainland and then reappearing a few months later on TV confessing of people in Thailand, in other countries. So the, the anxiety of the Hong Kong people was, was pretty palpable. And it's not clear why the Hong Kong government was introducing this, this legislation.
- [59:36]
B
Yeah, I agree with you completely. I think the Hong Kong, the British left a good legacy in many areas. What they didn't leave was a legacy of political leadership. They had great administrative officers, great, you know, yes men, yes women, people who could be a number two, number three lower down. They didn't have people who could lead. And again and again they had these self inflicted political wounds. And this, this extradition bill of the summer of 2019 was, was an example of that. And so instead of having 500,000 people out in the streets already, pretty incredible, we had a million people out, then 2 million people out. Think of this. 2 million people that would, even in a, in China or the United States, that would be a huge number in a city of seven and a half million people without the ability of Chinese, you know, mainlanders to come over the border. I mean proportionally it's as if 90 million people marched on Washington. We just had an incred, incredible outpouring and yet the government wouldn't even pretend to negotiate. They never had one meeting with any of the people, any of the opposition people. So this thing built and built and built. And then at the, in November of that year, November 2019, there were some elections for almost 500 different people were up for these very, the lowest level ward, ward elections. They were called district council elections. Nobody ever cared about them before. Incredible turnout. Over 70% of the elected population turned out for an off cycle election. And there was a smashing victory by the pro democracy forces. I think at this point Xi Jinping and the leadership in Zhongnanhai in Beijing just said we've lost Hong Kong. And instead of saying how do we win the trust of the people of Hong Kong? Gee we better ease up, we better keep the promises we made, they decided to double down and that's when they moved to introduce this, this sweeping national security legislation that's led to the, the tragedy this last five years.
- [61:43]
C
So in, in 2020 China introduces the National Security Law. And things go very, very quickly from, from this point of on including for Jimmy Lai. Walk us through how the National Security Law works, all its fail safe mechanism, the fact that it includes the stationing of the very fearsome National Security Bureau people from the mainland China operating in Hong Kong. Hong Kong. And, and what happened after it's introduced and, and the wave of arrests and. Yeah, and what happens to Jimin?
- [62:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, well thanks. A great question. In, in I think May it of 2020 it leaked out that China was preparing national security legislation. As I said before, under Article 23 of the Basic Law, Hong Kong was supposed to come up with its own legislation. But it was to supposed such a political lightning rod after the half a million people came out in 2003. The government just, it just never had the, the confidence to introduce this legislation. And it didn't have the trust of its people because the people didn't they, they knew that this would be abused. So Beijing illegally decided to introduce the legislation on itself. It was done totally in secret. It was apparently the leader of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of didn't even see the law until earlier the day that it was introduced. It was introduced a little after 11 o' clock at night on the night of June 30, the just before the anniversary of the handover. And Carrie Lam didn't see it. Nobody knew what was coming. And it was, it's vague, it's sweeping. It essentially strips away all the protections of a rules based, legally based system. So you're supposed to just take a couple of examples under the Basic Law. Again the Basic Law was promulgated by, promulgated by China itself. These were promises China made to the people of Hong Kong. So you're supposed to have the right to a jury trial. Well no jury trials. Under the National Security Law you're supposed to have the right to be able to choose your own lawyer. Well under the National Security Law you can't. You're supposed to have the right to free press well, you know, you know, many, many most independent news organizations have been shut in Hong Kong under the National Security Law. We go on and on and on. You're supposed to have the to bail. People are being held indefinitely under the National Security Law. So China broke pretty much all of its promises. A comprehensive breach of Basic Declaration, the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law. And as you say, things move very fast. There were a few arrests made during July, that first month of the national security law, July 2020. Jimmy decided, well, he decided he wouldn't leave Hong Kong. He knew he was in danger, but decided that he was going to stay, that Hong Kong had given him everything, that he had spoken up and fought for the people of Hong Kong and he wasn't going to just go into a comfortable exile and talk from abroad that he would really put his, put his money where his mouth was, put his body on the line and in.
- [65:10]
C
And let's remember that by then is a UK city citizen and he has residences around the world. And he has a number of people who try to convince him that, you know, this law will definitely be used against him. I mean, it was very clear he was enemy number one in Hong Kong for the Chinese authorities. He was, you know, a person that not only was, was able to organize and give support to opposition to the government and to the mainland authorities, but also had these contacts with the US governments, the UK Governments and so on. So really everything that the Chinese government strongly, strongly objects to, yet it decides heads that is not going to leave.
- [66:11]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, let me underscore that because there's some things we haven't talked about too much. You mentioned earlier his Catholicism. So he converted. He, he married in the early second marriage in the early 1990s. Converted to Catholicism a week after the handover as his, his wife Teresa says he knew trouble was coming and figured getting some help from a higher power is something that could, would be a good thing to do, a good precaution to take. I don'. That, Sorry, I don't. I mean that quite seriously. It's, you know, he's fearless. You know, he's, he's rich, so he has many resources, can hire a great legal team. He had this media platform which obviously has the Chinese had and has the Chinese Communists worried. They, they think that propaganda is how you control people's minds. He's fearless. He has this, the principles that he believes in that's underpinned by, by this deep, profound faith in God. And so from a Chinese standpoint, he has to be destroyed. I cannot think of another person since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 who's presented a problem of the sort that Jimmy had this combination of wealth, media platform, fearless belief in his own principles, and as you say, even before the National Security Law came in, people were telling Jimmy to get out.
- [67:37]
C
Out.
- [67:37]
B
And he told one of them, he told one of his aides, he said, I'd rather be hanging from a lamppost in Central than to give the Communists the satisfaction of saying that I ran away. He is not a guy to run. And he, he doubled down in July of that year. As soon as the National Security Law came out, Jimmy started these weekly broadcasts to the people of Hong Kong and the people of the world. Really. I was the moderator for most of them. They, they went on until he, he was put in prison at the beginning of December that year. He had the newspaper, Apple Daily and Next magazine were raided on August 10. So about five, six weeks after the National Security Law came in, Jimmy was held for almost 48 hours. I thought, wow, you know, he doesn't want to do these, these weekly broadcasts anymore. No, Mark, I'll do it. We're going to go ahead. I think we had more than 200,000 people watching us that week in real time and, and more later. He just kept going. And they took him away in December, that he was out for a few days over Christmas, December 2020. But he's been in prison since December 31, 2020, most of that time in solitary confinement. So close to 1,800 days in prison, in and out of various kind of ridiculous legal cases. Right now he's awaiting a verdict on the National Security Law trial. So you think of this. It's been over five years since he was arrested on these charges. He's had a trial that lasted over 150 days. Jimmy himself was on the stand for more than 50 days. Still no verdict. Not just Jimmy. Six of our other colleagues from Apple Daily, all of whom have pled guilty, including the, the CEO and the editor in chief of Apple Daily, they're all being held hostage. They haven't even been sentenced yet. So it's, you know, it's just, it's complet. Outrageous. But that's where it stands right now.
- [69:39]
C
And let me be clear. Jimmy Lai, as well as a number of other people, the editor in chief of Stand News, as well as many other, you know, major figures of Hong Kong. You know, the former chair of the Democratic Party, Albert hall, academics like Benny Tai, Joshua Wong, the student leader, Claudia.
- [70:14]
B
Mo.
- [70:16]
C
Cho Han Tong, you know, prominent lawyer. All these people have been, you know, arrested are, are languishing in jail awaiting trial or averting verdicts. And they are being charged under the national security law from 2020 for offenses that were committed before 2020. This is a retrospective law. I mean, I'm sure the lawyers made this point. I'm curious as to how the courts in Hong Kong can justify by the kind of breach of due process that they've engaged in under the National Security Law. And on these trials, of course, there are some provisions that allow ultimately the government to do what it wants. But for instance, Jimmy was not able to hire the lawyer of his choice. He was not able to present exculpatory evidence. He was not able to bring certain witnesses. He was sentenced in cases, in other legal cases for things that are no more than a, you know, a very light infraction to the lease terms of Apple Daily headquarters, for instance. And when you look at the case and you know, this is a weird combination of, of the, it is a little bit like forcing a square peg, which is the, you know, the, the common law system, which is due process, the independence of the judges and so on into a round hole. The mainland continental system, which is, you know, an instrument of, of political control. And then the hammer is the National Security Law and you just force the peg into the hole and the splinters fly. Because you have this very weird combination of something that is clearly a political trial while at the same time conducted in this sort of intricate Decantian chancery court type of flurry legalies and, and, and procedures. And even though the outcome is already dictated or he is guil, he will be found guilty. We just don't know what the, this, the sentence is.
- [73:06]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think you, you really sum it up very well. Well, it's, There are so many irregularities in this. As you say, they've got the robes, they have the wigs, they have all the appearances of the British common law tradition. And they still want the world to think it's very important for Hong Kong that the world thinks that this is still ruled it's rule of law and it's not. I mean, as you say, there are retrospective charges and those are justified. Well, they want to find a state of mind. Mind. So, you know, I mean, it's, it's outrageous. I mean, it's hard to even get started with, trying to explain because it's so surreal. So Jimmy is accused of collusion with foreign forces. Most of the evidence seems to be that on this trip to 29 in 2019 to Washington D.C. that you alluded to earlier, that he met with the then Vice President, Mike Pence, the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, a few other people, and Jimmy. Yes, Jimmy wanted support for the pro democracy people in Hong Kong. He wasn't asking for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party. Even if he had been. So what, he's supposed to have free speech. Why can't he call for the overthrow of it? He was asking for sanctions at that point. Sanctions again, there was nothing illegal about that. So, I mean, it's just so many jumps that, that have been made under the National Security Law. All of a sudden it's illegal to call for sanctions. Well, why should that be illegal? It's a free speech issue. I can call for sanctions against the US or France or anybody I want to. There's nothing wrong with that. But the prosecutors have said that the mere act of calling for sanctions is illegal. And Jimmy did it a year before this law came in. So it's illegal. I mean, it's. It's really like Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka meets Orwell. I mean, you almost don't know where to begin because it's so surreal. You mentioned this lease violation. Jimmy was sentenced to six years, reduced strangely to five years and nine months because of. He subleased a tiny corner of these vast headquarters for his private office. He paid the public company rent. It's very, very common. This was disclosed to shareholders and other people. Somehow this is. This was turned into fraud. It would be like I rent you an apartment and I say no pets and you have a cat in there and I throw you in jail for five years and nine months. I mean, it's absurd. Another, he was sentenced to 14 months. Well, there were a couple of different civil disobedience charges, but one of them was incitement to rob riot because he got out of his car and lit a candle and said a prayer. Didn't talk to a single soul. But that was considered incitement to riot. So, I mean, the way that the law is being twisted is extraordinary. And so we are waiting for this verdict. The trial ended in August. We don't know. We might have a verdict by Christmas, might be next year. I actually think that it's difficult for the judges to write this verdict because the whole world is going to be looking at this and to see what kind of legal reasoning they can find to find Jimmy guilty. It's possible that they're off somewhere like an Iowa writer's workshop getting a lesson in fiction writing. Because there's no way you can find him guilty under the common law tradition and under the promises of the Basic law and the Joint Declaration. But as you say, they have to find him guilty. Guilty because it's a political charge. And the judges themselves, I think, realize how vulnerable they are. And it's, it's kind of crazy, but they've been acting more like prosecutors often in, in questioning Jimmy and others, they really must find him guilty. And yet under the common law tradition, under, you know, tradition of centuries of free speech activities, it's clear that Jimmy, who's a principal, multiple exponent of non violence, has done nothing more than exercise his rights as a citizen, as a, as a. As a publisher, as a newspaper man.
- [77:21]
C
So I want to talk about the prison conditions under which he's been held and also more generally the prison conditions for all the people who are being held under this law of over 300 people, but also many more, hundreds and thousands. And there are other type of offenses because you're also the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. But first I just wanted to point out that one of the reasons I was really keen to do this interview with you, aside from the fact that that the. The back the book is really a fascinating read, is that there is something to be learned about the Hong Kong case because this was a rule of law society that. Where rule of law is being pulled out by an authoritarian force and leaving society vulnerable. Vulnerable to the whims of autocracy. And unfortunately, this is what we're seeing more and more around the world. And it used to be you were either an autocracy or a democracy, or maybe you were shifting from one to the other. But for established democracy and rule of law system to see these freedoms being. Being demolished and the guarantees of the rule of law and due process to be airbrushed by new political power. This is really something that resonates with the historical moment we're living in. So Hong Kong has, I think, a lot of lessons for the rest of us. But tell us about the prison conditions because even then there Jimmy's lie is facing sort of extraordinary treatment at the hand of the authorities. And so are many of the other political prisoners. I think that's the term we should be using that the foundation advocates for.
- [79:46]
B
Yeah, well, thanks. I mean a great question. And that's what we really need to remember is the people, the hundreds of political prisoners that are being held in Hong Kong now. Okay, talking about Jimmy. That's A good place to start. Jimmy's been held in solitary confinement for most of the time since. Since he was incarcerated in December 2020. Under the Mandela principles, Mandela rule, United nations standard, any solitary confinement should only be used as a last res resort. It should never be for more than 15 days. And for. Jimmy's been in prison for, you know, roughly 1,800 days, and he's been in solitary most of that time. It's, it's, it's torture and there's no other way. That's what the United nations calls it. That's what it is. And the, the Hong Kong government is quite defensive about this, says that Jimmy has asked for this, for this treatment to be put in, in protective custody, I think they call it. And they've also said that the more than two dozen people. The last figures we have are 20, 24, that the more than two dozen people who were held in solitary for more than a month, all of, all of them requested that, according to the Hong Kong government. This is totally preposterous. Now, I have no doubt that they signed a document that's allowed authorities to say that they requested this, but it's clear that this is under coercion. Hong Kong needs to allow independent, independent international observers to be looking at conditions, be talking to prisoners, to getting to the bottom of, particularly of the solitary confinement, but also the just squalid degrading conditions of Hong Kong prisons, of the political indoctrination that's going on there. It's, you know, it's a, it's a tragic situation in a place that again, was as really as free as New York or London or Paris until five or so years ago, has now to, you know, descended into, you know, totalitarian hell. For anybody who's dared to utter a political opinion that the Hong Kong government doesn't want. According to the research done by the Hong Kong Democracy Council, there have been close to 2,000 people jailed for political offenses in the last five, five and a half years there. We think that there are between 700 and 800 of them still in jail now and, you know, many of them in, for. For quite long term. So it's, it's a very, very difficult situation that my group, the. The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong foundation, recently came out with a condition on a report on prison conditions in, in Hong Kong based on testimony from former political prisoners as well as. As other research. And, you know, it's. It's shocking. It's just not the Hong. It's not the Hong Kong that we knew and that I think Hong Kong tells the world that it is, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's illegal under international conventions conditions, and it's torture. In the case of Jimmy and others who are being held in long term solitary confinement. And let's be real about what this means. It means no natural light. It means a very small cell with room really for a toilet and a bed. It means maybe 50 minutes, 5, 0 minutes a day outside of exercise. Exercise. It means you're often moved to court when you have court hearings in manacles and chains, sometimes inside a cage, inside a kind of armored vehicle. This is just absolutely outrageous, inhuman treatment, particularly in the case of Jimmy Lai, for somebody who's always espoused nonviolence, who's made it clear that he's not running away from what the Chinese authorities are trying to dish out.
- [83:37]
C
And we're recording this on October 31st. President Trump just had a meeting with President Xi Jinping during his Asian tour. He had expressed concern and interest about Jimmy Lai and his case. And we are now waiting for, as you said, the sentencing verdict for Jimmy Lai. Wu is going to decide on this verdict, do you think?
- [84:14]
B
Well, ultimately this is Xi Jinping's decision to keep Jimmy Lai in prison, or I would hope to release him on humanitarian grounds, if nothing in medical grounds. President Trump has expressed his concern for Jimmy on many occasions, most recently publicly, just before he got on his presidential helicopter to start his trip to Asia at the end of October. We understand that he brought this up in the meeting with General Secretary Xi Jinping and expressed his concern for Jimmy, for Jimmy's health, underscored that releasing Jimmy would be good for, for Sino, U.S. relations and would be good for China. I mean, Jimmy Lai is more of a problem for China in prison than he would be outside. He's, you know, he's probably the best known political prisoner in the world. He's drawing attention to China's barbaric human rights records in a way that I don't think is helpful for Xi Jinping's agenda. And he's an aging man, he's in his late 70s. He had diabetes before he went in. I've mentioned before his hearing loss, you know, lost tip of his finger. Since he's been in prison, he's had Covid. He had a cataract operation that seems to have not really gone that well. And, and he's aged, he's not a threat to China and he should, he should get out. If he dies in prison, he's forever a martyr. It's a legacy that China, China doesn't want and couldn't control. It happened to Liu Xiaobo, the only Chinese who's won a Nobel Peace Prize. And you know, sadly, Liu Xiaobo is, is better known because of his death than he was in life. And I, I don't, I don't think this is in China's interest. They've made their point. The, the opposition in Hong Kong is, is crushed. And it's time to let Jimmy, as you say, Jimmy is a British citizen. Citizen. I think he'd like to join his son, his family in the uk in London and enjoy the last remaining years of his life with his family.
- [86:27]
C
Mark, we could go on with this conversation for a long time. This is a fantastic book. Jimmy is not a perfect character. This comes through your book as well. He has as ideas that you don't necessarily, and the readers won't necessarily share. But it is an extraordinary life, an extraordinary display of moral courage and an extraordinarily important case for the future of Hong Kong and the standing of China in the world as you, you said. So I want to thank you for this but before we leave, I want to you to tell maybe the audience where they can find you, where they can find the information about what's happening in Hong Kong, the foundation and so on and maybe what's next for you as well.
- [87:33]
B
Great. Well, first of all, Nicholas, thank you so much. You're an extraordinarily wonderful, well informed and really appreciate your interest. I'm at the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. You can sign up for our newsletter. You can find us online. My direct email is mark clifford the cfhk.org that's Mark Clifford. H e c f h k.org and just appreciate everybody, everybody's support. Everybody can do something for the people of Hong Kong, the people of China and remember that the fight for freedom goes on everywhere, always. And Jimmy is one of the most extraordinary people I've been fortunate enough to meet. And whatever our differences are, and there are many, this guy does not deserve to be in jail. He's a freedom fighter. He's a man of principle. He's a man of courage. He's a man without fear and he deserves to be in freedom. So thanks again, Nicholas.
- [88:42]
C
Thank you very much, Mark. This was a conversation with Mark Clifford for his book the Troublemaker How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's greatest Dissident and China's most fair critic. I'm Nicholas Becklin for the Human Rights Channel on the new Books and network. Until next time. Thank you.