Britain's betrayal of Jimmy Lai repeats an old mistake

Telegraph

31-03-2025

This column normally resists the fashion of trashing the British empire. It contained many horrors, but its greatness was real. Like the Roman, it should be properly studied, not ignorantly deplored.
In one respect, however, we are not self-critical enough. Our imperial withdrawals were not always as benevolent as we make out. Some, such as Canada or Singapore, were successful. Others, like the partition of India, caused great suffering.
The last big colonial withdrawal was Hong Kong, which looked good but wasn't. Despite the best efforts of Margaret Thatcher and the last Governor, Chris Patten, the Foreign Office's long-term policy towards our once astonishingly thriving colony failed in its declared objectives.
Witness the story of one man, Jimmy Lai, currently languishing in solitary confinement. It is well told in his recent biography The Troublemaker by Mark L. Clifford.
Mr Lai was born in southern China, probably in 1948, just before the Communist Revolution. His father fled to Hong Kong, severing ties with the family. Jimmy's peasant mother brought him up as best she could, forced to a part-time labour camp, and returning home at weekends. During the week, the young Lai children had to fend for themselves.
Aged 8 or 9, Jimmy, became a porter at the only station which admitted visitors from Hong Kong to mainland China. One day, during the famine caused by Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward, a passenger gave Jimmy a half-eaten Cadbury's Bar Six. He loved this unknown substance: 'That triggered my determination to go to Hong Kong.' Aged 12, he made it, hidden in a fishing boat. He reached his impoverished aunt in Kowloon. When he woke the next morning, he could smell proper food, the smell of freedom: 'I was so emotional...that when the food was served, I stood up to eat it.'
Jimmy quickly got work in a glove factory, losing a finger-tip in an accident. At night, he learnt English. Soon he became production manager at a weaving factory. In time, he acquired a textile factory, graduating eventually to retail and founding his first Giordano fashion shop in 1981. He was now a millionaire.
Radicalised by the Tiananmen Square massacres of 1989, Jimmy Lai feared for Hong Kong's freedom after the colony's promised handover to China in 1997. In 1990, he launched a magazine, Next. As well as lots of showbiz scandals, it exposed political ones, argued for freedom and denounced Communism. In 2003, Next exposed China's cover-up of the SARS virus. When Covid-19 appeared in 2020, such reporting had been snuffed out.
In 1995, Mr Lai launched the even more raffish Apple Daily. It published, for example, a user's guide to Hong Kong prostitutes. When Jimmy Lai became a Roman Catholic in 1997, he repented of such acts of naughtiness. Catholics were and are prominent in defending Hong Kong freedoms. (Alas, the present Pope, Francis, is not.) He had become a British citizen the year before and remains one.
The British empire gave Hong Kong 'rule of law, private property, freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion,' he has said, 'That is why China is very afraid of us.' Unfortunately, modern British governments are very afraid of China. Soon after 1997 handover, China began violating the 1984 Anglo-Hong Kong Agreement. Apple Daily led the opposition to the new national security law which Beijing, thus breaking the agreement on 'One Country: Two Systems', wished to impose. Half a million people marched against the measure. The law was shelved. But gradually the clampdown tightened. Jimmy Lai's publications were now the only big ones which dared defy the authorities.
In 2013, the huge 'Umbrella Protests' began, opposing the regime's attempt to go back on promised free elections. Mr Lai helped organise a protest plebiscite, which suffered a massive directed denial of service (DDoS) bombardment from China. At one demonstration, party thugs threw pig's offal all over him. Disgracefully some British banks withdrew their Apple Daily advertising.
During further repression in 2019, Apple Daily signed up unprecedented numbers of subscribers with the pitch, 'Resist injustice with truth. It only costs 22 cents a day.'
It ended up costing Jimmy Lai a lot more. He was arrested in 2020, charged with illegal assembly, the first of many such moves. The National Security Law was finally introduced, criminalising dissent and ditching jury trials. Unlike most business leaders, Jimmy Lai stayed and fought. Prison was the result, as was the freezing of his many millions. The final edition of Apple Daily appeared on 24 June 2019.
Currently, Mr Lai is remanded in custody, awaiting a much-postponed trial under the National Security Act for 'colluding with foreign forces' – viz. meeting the then Vice-President, Mike Pence, in Washington. He languishes, with diabetes, alone in a windowless cell. He is allowed only visits from his wife. Silenced, he draws religious pictures, mainly of Christ on the cross, which sometimes reach the outside world.
All legal moves against Mr Lai are carried out with the appurtenances, including wigs and gowns, of the English common law, yet the reality is that China has imposed totalitarian oppression. The former President of our Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, is still a 'non-permanent' judge on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, lending spurious respectably to this charade.
Mr Lai and thousands of other Hong Kong people learnt about and flourished from freedom under the British Empire but have now been betrayed by the manner of its retreat.