by Charles Moore, Telegraph
The Hong Kong publisher’s only crime was committing honest journalism
Jimmy Lai is 78, with diabetes and heart problems after five years already of solitary confinement, so his 20-year sentence in Hong Kong on Monday for sedition and “colluding with foreign forces” amounts to a death sentence.
What did Mr Lai do? He committed repeated acts of journalism. As the title of his now suppressed paper, Apple Daily, reminds us – it launched in 1995 with the slogan “an apple a day keeps the lies away” – he made sure that each day’s news was properly reported in Hong Kong.
Why? Because his escape as a penniless child from mainland China and his subsequent adventures in the then British colony taught him the difference between tyranny and freedom. He prospered, first in the rag trade, later in the media. He was utterly committed to that freedom, believing that British rule in the territory had ensured it. Proudly, he became a British citizen.
He was also proud to stay in Hong Kong and fight for that freedom to continue, including support for the huge street protests against China’s imposition of a national security law. As his son Sebastian Lai said yesterday, it is for this heroism that he is being punished.
Unlike most Hong Kong tycoons, Mr Lai neither ran away nor kowtowed. In prison, he is denied medical care and the sacraments of the Church. As his body suffers, however, his mind seems to strengthen. Mr Lai’s daughter, Claire, recently sent me copies of her father’s illicit prison drawings of the crucified Christ and his prayers of thanks that his suffering brings him closer to God.
Read also: Britain cannot leave Jimmy Lai to die in jail by Benedict Rogers, Spectator