Tightening its grip on Hong Kong, China is determined to make an example of the prodemocracy media tycoon.
By Timothy McLaughlin
HONG KONG—When Beijing imposed the national-security law on Hong Kong in 2020, its goal was not simply to stifle free expression and lock up dissenters. The idea was to subordinate every institution in the city, leaving the “one country, two systems” framework that granted autonomy to the Chinese territory an empty slogan. Henceforth Beijing would no longer tolerate criticism from Hong Kong, or protests on its streets.
With the prodemocracy movement of 2019–20 effectively crushed, the Hong Kong government and officials in Beijing have found additional uses for the law: to settle old scores and rewrite history. By prosecuting a relatively small number of high-profile cases under the national-security law, the authorities are portraying the movement not as a popular uprising but as a traitorous conspiracy of troublemakers in league with foreign powers. Any plot needs a ringleader, and the authorities believe they have one to fit their narrative: the media tycoon Jimmy Lai.
In this telling, Lai has been elevated to an omniscient actor—a puppeteer of the unwilling masses who for years used his wealth and publications (notably Apple Daily newspaper), with assistance from the United Kingdom and United States, to dupe the city’s citizens into doing his nefarious bidding. Lai and his newspaper loom large in the most consequential national-security-law cases going to trial. Reams of prosecutorial documents portray him as a scheming “mastermind.” A source close to one trial involving Lai told me that Hong Kong’s national-security officers press suspects on their links to his business, cobbling the suspects’ answers together to fit a predetermined narrative.
“The police are making the story of Jimmy Lai,” this person, who asked not to be named for fear of police retaliation, told me. The decentralized nature of the 2019 movement is still viewed with paranoid disbelief by those who opposed it. The authorities “don’t believe that everything came from the ground up,” because they think “that is impossible.”
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