Activists gather in Taipei in August, 2025, to support imprisoned Hong Kong pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai for the national security trial.ChiangYing-ying/The Associated Press
Dennis Kwok is a former Hong Kong lawmaker now based in New York.
The last time I saw Jimmy Lai was at our annual dinner, five months after Beijing enacted the National Security Law in Hong Kong in June, 2020. By then, the offices of his Apple Daily newspaper had already been raided by 200 police officers; he’d been arrested, and subsequently released on bail.
We in Hong Kong’s democracy movement were not naive about what was happening. We knew the worst was yet to come. The Hong Kong authorities were just beginning to learn how to turn themselves into a full authoritarian regime. The law’s chief objectives were to eliminate people like us.
And one month after our dinner, in December, 2020, Jimmy reported to police as part of his bail conditions, and was immediately arrested for alleged fraud; a week later, he became the first high-profile figure to be charged under the new law. He’s been in prison, including in solitary confinement, ever since.
On Monday, the Hong Kong court sentenced the now-78-year-old pro-democracy media mogul to 20 years in jail. His so-called crime: foreign collusion, for calling for Western sanctions against Hong Kong officials responsible for human-rights violations and crackdowns on democracy. The court was presided over by three national security judges who had been hand-picked by the Hong Kong government to try Jimmy – their public enemy No. 1.
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No one was surprised that Jimmy would be convicted; the writing was on the wall. Still, something managed to surprise me: the outright venom the judges demonstrated for him. Throwing away any façade of professionalism, these judges made clear that they were on a mission to get Jimmy for Beijing, and to make an example out of him.
At one point, during cross-examination, Madame Justice Esther Toh even asked, “Is your skin yellow, Mr. Lai?” in a grotesque attempt to tie ethnicity to nationality. Jimmy replied: “I am a Hong Konger.”
These days, any talk of judicial independence in Hong Kong is a joke. With his multiple convictions, all handed down by Hong Kong courts, Jimmy will not be able to get out of jail until he is in his late 90s. Murderers, rapists and arsonists will generally get up to one-third of their time off their criminal sentences if they demonstrate good behaviour whilst in custody. Not so, for someone now deemed a “national-security threat,” whose “evil deeds,” as Hong Kong’s Beijing-selected chief executive John Lee said, were “beyond measure.”
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Jimmy ran Apple Daily, one of the most successful independent media outlets in Hong Kong and the standard go-to newspaper for many Hong Kongers. It was part of our daily lives, and part of what it meant to live in Hong Kong under the principle of “one country, two systems,” which was supposed to preserve our freedom as agreed in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international treaty registered with the United Nations in 1984.
Many Hong Kongers, like Jimmy and I, believed in and fought for this guaranteed freedom. Now, Jimmy is being sent to spend the rest of his life in jail, and China seems to be getting away scot-free despite breaking its treaty obligations.
Jimmy told me that he is willing to give the rest of his life to fight for Hong Kong’s freedom – to “burn,” as he put it, for Hong Kong. Jimmy liked to say that it was Hong Kong that gave him everything and made him who he is. And as a deeply devout Catholic, he told me that he feels that God put him in this place for a purpose.
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As a friend, I continue to demand that the Hong Kong authorities release Jimmy and other political prisoners. They are prisoners of conscience. Some of my other friends, such as Cambridge-educated barrister Chow Hang-tung and senior lawyer and former lawmaker Albert Ho, are currently being tried for subversion.
Their crime, according to the courts: Holding candlelight vigils in Victoria Park since 1990, to commemorate those who died in the Tiananmen Square massacre and to call for the end of one-party rule.
Last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney was in China, negotiating trade agreements to try to pivot Canada away from its dependence on the United States. I wondered whether he and his government would strike a deal, or if they would learn anything from Hong Kong’s experience over the past decade. It looks like Ottawa has decided to take the naive approach.