Jimmy Lai’s show trial and the death of Hong Kong’s freedom

China’s ongoing effort to crush democracy and free expression in Hong Kong appears all but complete.

Once one of the world’s dynamic centers of trade and finance, the Pearl of the East is fading under the boot of stifling oppression.

The first symbol of the city’s fall is the great entrepreneur and publisher Jimmy Lai, whose Apple Daily was a vibrant and far-reaching newspaper before Beijing decided to extinguish all but official communist voices.

Lai has been in state custody for four years after leading democratic protests and being arrested on trumped up fraud charges.

Lai was convicted in 2022 and is now on trial again on charges of publishing seditious material in violation of new national security laws Beijing passed as a mode of controlling Hong Kong’s people.

At 77, Lai has led one of the world’s most extraordinary lives. He built himself up from nothing, from unimaginable poverty, into a textile magnate and then a publisher of a no-holds-barred paper that told it like it was.

He is exactly the sort of person the neo-Maoists now running China can’t abide, a man of individual accomplishment with a giant heart for human freedom.

Lai has been able to testify in his own defense, but there is no reason to believe that this is more than a show trial and that he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

While he is the most recognizable victim of the communist takeover of Hong Kong, he is not alone. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that dozens of pro-democracy demonstrators were sentenced.

“The trial displayed just how firmly Beijing has cemented its control of Hong Kong, a former British colony that was returned to China in 1997. While the territory was once a hotbed of dissent, the mass protests that once filled the streets have disappeared,” The Journal reported.

Hong Kong is not a land blessed with rich natural resources. It is a rock that thrived on the free exchange of ideas and the (more or less) free exchange of trade. What is Hong Kong now?

It is an emblem of a destructive ideology bent on controlling human life and curtailing natural freedom.

Jimmy Lai is testifying for his life in a Chinese court. He is speaking for us all.

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