Jimmy Lai, Witness to Truth
The Editorial. December 2, 2024. National Catholic Register. Original Article.
EDITORIAL: Lai’s testimony in court has highlighted the unswerving determination of this heroic Chinese Catholic to tell the truth — no matter the personal cost.
Media magnate Jimmy Lai, who has been unjustly imprisoned in solitary confinement for nearly four years because of his support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, continues to testify in his own defense, witnessing as much to his Catholic faith as to his innocence.
Lai’s testimony, which began on Nov. 20, is exposing the flimsiness of the charges against him. But even more, it highlights the unswerving determination of this heroic Chinese Catholic to tell the truth — no matter the personal cost.
Of course, truth has never had anything to do with the trumped-up charges leveled against Lai. Local Chinese authorities claim he colluded with a broad range of foreign actors, including senior members of the Trump administration, with the objective of separating Hong Kong from China’s control. This is a total fiction. Lai’s “crime,” as publisher of the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, was to allow his publication to report accurately about Beijing’s continuing betrayals of its 1997 promises to preserve Hong Kong’s existing civil liberties for at least 50 years, which the communist regime gave as a condition for securing the U.K.’s handover of control over its former colony.
To clamp down on this journalistic truth-telling, Hong Kong police invaded Apple Daily’s offices in August of 2020 and carted Lai away in handcuffs, shortly after a draconian new national security law came into effect. In 2021, he was convicted on a charge of fraud and sentenced to six years in jail. If convicted of the more serious charges of collusion and sedition he is now facing, he could receive an additional life sentence.
None of this has cowed Lai. Appearing in court at long last to defend himself, he forcefully rebutted prosecution claims that he had promoted Hong Kong’s independence from China. He specifically instructed the staff of Apple Daily never to do that, he testified, stressing that the newspaper’s priorities instead “are actually the core values of the people of Hong Kong,” including the “rule of law, freedom, pursuit of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly.”
Indeed, Lai told the court, he decided to become a newspaper publisher specifically “to participate in delivering information, which is delivering freedom.” And he sought always to state only things that he believed to be true. “For truth prevails in God’s kingdom, and that’s good enough for me,” he explained.
The depth of Lai’s commitment to truth and to freedom, anchored in his Christian faith, has astonished even his closest friends.
“Jimmy believes we were created for truth and that it is our job to speak the truth, especially when no one else will, at whatever the cost,” Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn said at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 2022. “How else could a man so willingly exchange the comfortable life of a Hong Kong multimillionaire for the prison cell of a Chinese dissident?”
McGurn, who befriended Lai when he lived in Hong Kong in the 1990s and who became his godfather when Lai converted to Catholicism in 1997, believes the criminal proceedings have turned into a fiasco for the Chinese and Hong Kong governments, courtesy of their failure to break Lai’s spirit.
“With all this, the trial is only showing what everyone in Hong Kong already knows: Jimmy was an incredibly engaged publisher whose journalism proved highly popular,” he wrote last month.
President-elect Donald Trump has been following Lai’s case closely and has committed to press for his release when he takes office. Chinese authorities might be inclined to comply with Trump’s request — if only to spare themselves from further embarrassment stemming from Lai’s ongoing witness to the truth from his jail cell. Meanwhile, it’s critical that we continue to pray for this brave, good man.