“I love the Thunderer,” declared Jimmy Lai as I walked into his office at Apple Daily. It was 1996, the year after the then 48-year-old publisher had started his Hong Kong newspaper, modelled, he said, on The Times — hence his admiration of the newspaper, whose 19th-century nickname has stuck. “It speaks its mind,” he enthused. “And just like The Times, we are fearless.”
Fearlessness wasn’t enough to protect Lai from China’s sweeping National Security Law (NSL), under which he was last week found guilty of conspiracy and sedition. A British citizen, he has so far endured more than 1,800 days in solitary confinement following his arrest in 2020. He is due to be sentenced next month and it is likely he will die in prison for “crimes” that carry a life sentence.
It is a delicate problem for Sir Keir Starmer, who is expected to make an official visit to China next month and to meet Xi Jinping, the president. It also casts a shadow on Anglo-Sino relations, even as Chinese-made Christmas toys and electronics fly off the shelves and shiploads of electric cars make their way round the world from Chinese ports to the UK where, unlike in European Union countries, they are sold tariff-free.
The awkward questions are partly about human rights in the former British colony, and partly about whether international institutions have defended Lai as robustly as he deserves. The trial was widely condemned by western governments and human rights organisations.
Lai’s London-based legal team appealed to the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, about Lai’s deteriorating health — he’s diabetic — and the conditions in which he’s being held in the British-built Stanley maximum security prison on Hong Kong Island. Lai has no direct sunlight in his cell and can’t see the sky. Lai’s son, Sebastien, who has not seen or spoken to his father in five years, said his father was “not doing OK”. “He’s kept in a concrete box … and this is in Hong Kong. It’s not only hot but incredibly humid, up to 30-40C. We know he’s not well.”
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The UN’s calls for Lai’s release failed to move Esther Toh, the lead judge in Lai’s case, who said in her summing up last week there was no doubt Lai had “harboured his resentment and hatred” of the People’s Republic of China for most of his adult life.
Lai was convicted in part for things he’d said and published in Apple Daily. Among the newspaper’s targets was China’s penal system — including the so-called laogai“reform through labour” camps where China’s dissidents were sent. Many never returned, including those rounded up during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
It was these laogai that Lai was keen to talk about when he sent me a message via the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club in 1996. The previous year I’d travelled to China’s Shandong peninsula on Christmas Day to expose how prisoners incarcerated without trial were being forced to mine graphite in appalling conditions in the bitter cold. The graphite was sold to UK companies, including British Steel. The revelation infuriated the Chinese authorities and led to my own arrest and deportation.
Lai wanted Apple Daily to engage in exactly this type of investigation, he said, as he gave me a tour of his fledgling media empire in admittedly cluttered and insalubrious surroundings on a Hong Kong industrial estate. His remarks, published in The Sunday Times after our interview, signalled his disdain for the Chinese authorities. He repeated his view of Li Peng, China’s prime minister at the time, as a “turtle’s egg with zero IQ”, one of the most stinging of Chinese insults.
Rufford’s interview with Lai in The Sunday Times in 1996
The Chinese authorities had already responded to such insults by closing a store in Beijing belonging to Lai’s Giordano clothing empire. Lai later resigned as Giordano’s chairman and sold his controlling stake to protect it from further retaliation.
Beijing refused to issue visas to Lai’s newspaper and magazine reporters. He told me he was making arrangements for his four children to go to America before the handover of Hong Kong to China, just in case. (Lai now has six children from his two marriages.) He was unconcerned about his own safety, even with the 1997 handover looming. “The worst they could do to me is arrest me and put me in jail. But I don’t think I would be in prison very long. I don’t think communism in China will last longer than ten years and could collapse in three,” he said.
The media tycoon in 2020 shortly before his arrest under the new National Security Law
ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
On that, Lai was mistaken. Instead of communism collapsing, things have gone in the opposite direction. The rights of Hongkongers like Lai are supposedly protected by the Basic Law which underpinned legal arrangements for the 1997 handover. Campaigners for Lai have pointed out: “Article 27 of the Basic Law guarantees freedom of the press yet individuals in this case have been imprisoned for engaging in journalism.”
However, the NSL effectively overrides it. It was passed to quell civil unrest that rocked the former colony in 2019-20, sparked by anti-government protests. Lai was accused of fanning the unrest, using Apple Daily as a mouthpiece.
The Hong Kong government silenced Lai’s newspaper in 2020. Police raided Apple Daily’s headquarters and the authorities froze Lai’s assets. The newspaper’s YouTube channels were shut down the same day.
The crackdown has continued and gathered pace. Last Sunday Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, which has spoken up for self-determination since the territory ceased to be a British colony, passed a motion to disband. The party had been blocked from recent tightly controlled elections for the territory’s legislature, and leaders said they were facing growing pressure to stop all activities.
When the final issue of Apple Daily was published on June 24, 2020, a million copies were sold — up from the usual 80,000 — making it (briefly) Hong Kong’s bestselling publication. A small but significant victory for Lai to reflect on as he spends his days in solitary.
