Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong champion of freedom who is currently a political prisoner, has become the global face of those repressed in China. As announced today, he will be this year’s “honorary recipient” of the prestigious Bradley Prize for being a “courageous advocate for democracy and freedom of the press.” (I was a 2023 recipient.)
This is the latest tribute to Jimmy Lai. It is significant as it comes from the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an institution of the American heartland. It is a sign that Jimmy Lai, like Andrei Sakharov and Nelson Mandela before him, is becoming a household name. He is the only prisoner among China’s many thousands to be gaining name recognition among the broader American public.
Xi Jinping has turned Lai into a living legend by subjecting the 77-year-old to a high-stakes national security trial, one likely to result in a life sentence. It now drags into its 17th month and may not conclude until fall. In the meantime, Lai is being held incommunicado in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison. He has been there since December 2021. He makes no secret that his Catholic faith gives him courage; the government’s arbitrary prohibition against Lai receiving Holy Communion makes his ordeal even harder.
After China’s consolidation of control over Hong Kong in mid-2020, Lai was charged with and then convicted of lesser offenses involving his pro-democracy activism. In one case decided in December 2021, he was sentenced to 13 months in prison for lighting a candle at a vigil commemorating Tiananmen massacre victims. This used to be an annual event in Hong Kong when it was free of the CCP. “If commemorating those who died because of injustice is a crime, then inflict on me that crime and let me suffer the punishment . . . so I may share the burden and glory of those young men and women who shed their blood on 4 June [1989],” Lai wrote in a letter then.
Authorities next threw the book at him. They accused him of publishing seditious materials and “colluding with foreign forces,” under the sweeping National Security Law of 2020 (NSL), imposed by the Chinese Communist Party in violation of its 1997 agreement with Britain. Prosecutors argued that he was the “mastermind” of a conspiracy to destabilize Hong Kong by political activism and criticisms in the now closed Apple Daily newspaper, the free press he founded in 1995 and wrote for. He once wrote: “Yes, I am anti-Communist. I am completely opposed to the Communist Party because I disdain all things that restrict personal freedom.”
The NSL doesn’t define “collusion.” In Lai’s case, part of the evidence consists of his meetings in 2019, before the law existed, with Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and other prominent officials in Washington. Lai has pleaded not guilty.
Jimmy Lai’s mettle can be fully appreciated from knowing his rags to riches story. He grew up as an impoverished street urchin in mainland China, while his mother was in a labor camp. At 13, Jimmy escaped to Hong Kong. There he got a menial job in the apparel industry and eventually opened his own clothing business through which he became a self-made billionaire, selling colorful and affordable casual wear to Chinese people shedding their drab Maoist uniforms. During this time, Lai read The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and was deeply influenced by the book’s critique of socialism. In 1997, he had a religious conversion and was baptized a Catholic. When the CCP cracked down on Hong Kong, Lai could have fled to his home in London. Instead, he chose to stay with the Hong Kong dissidents to bolster their courage and to take a stand, himself, for the ideals of freedom that he cherishes, which he once said defines his being. “When you lift yourself above your own self-interest, you find the meaning of life. . . . The way I look at it, if I suffer for the right cause, it only defines the person I am becoming.”
Since his imprisonment, Jimmy Lai has received further honors. He is the subject of the newly released biography by his business board director Mark Clifford, titled The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, as well as of the documentary The Hong Konger by the Acton Institute. He is the inspiration for a current congressional initiative (H.R. 2522) to rename a street in Washington, D.C., “Jimmy Lai Way,” as was done for Sakharov and Mandela. He has been nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize by several members of Congress. He received the libertarian Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty in 2023, and an honorary degree from Catholic University of America in 2022, in addition to other accolades.
Beijing is turning Jimmy Lai into a political martyr. His story of suffering for freedom is not only inspirational. It, ironically, has drawn the world’s attention to the very oppression the CCP tries so mightily to cover up.