Hong Kong: Worldwide Support for Jimmy Lai

The 77-year-old, who has been in solitary confinement for nearly four years for his support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, continues to testify to his Catholic Faith and innocence. More than that, he demonstrates an unwavering determination to tell the truth, no matter the cost.

Lai’s “crime” as publisher of Apple Daily was to report on Beijing’s betrayals of its 1997 promises to preserve Hong Kong’s existing civil liberties for at least 50 years. It was a condition of Britain ceding control of its former colony.

To stop these journalistic revelations, Hong Kong police raided Apple Daily’s offices in August 2020 and took Lai away in handcuffs for pretrial detention until his trial, shortly after the new national security law came into effect.

Speaking in court for the first time to defend himself, he vigorously refuted the prosecution’s allegations that he had promoted Hong Kong’s independence from China. “Jimmy believes that we were created for the truth and that it is our duty to tell the truth, especially when no one else will, no matter the cost,” Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn said in 2022.

“How else could a man so willingly trade the comfortable life of a Hong Kong multimillionaire for the prison cell of a Chinese dissident?” He confided: “He could have run away. He has homes all over the world, but he stood his ground and went to prison for his principles.”

In the 1990s, living in Hong Kong, William McGurn befriended Jimmy Lai and was his godfather when, having converted to Catholicism, he was baptized in 1997 by Bishop Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, then Bishop of Hong Kong.

The American journalist believes that the criminal proceedings have turned into a fiasco for Beijing. “Still, the trial only shows what everyone in Hong Kong already knows: Jimmy was an incredibly committed publisher whose journalism was hugely popular,” he wrote last month.

The Vatican’s Attitude Is a “Disaster”

And Edward Pentin points out that “more than 100 politicians from 24 countries have come to Jimmy Lai’s defense, writing a joint letter dated November 19, 2024, condemning China for his “arbitrary detention and unfair trial.”

“They have ‘urgently’ demanded the immediate release of Lai, who is 77 and is being held in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison in Hong Kong.” The American journalist specifies that “he has not been allowed to receive Holy Communion since December 2023.”

On November 20, William McGurn told the National Catholic Register that the Vatican’s attitude was a “disaster” and wondered “what will it take for them to realize that [the provisional agreement] has not worked.” The journalist is referring here to the third renewal of the Provisional Agreement on the Appointment of Bishops in China, signed on September 22, 2022 between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China, and renewed on October 22, 2024 by both parties for four years.

But, George Weigel pointed out in the National Catholic Register of August 28, 2024: “Under the dictator Xi Jinping, the religious policy of the People’s Republic of China is ‘Sinicization.’ The gullible or the duped see it as another form of inculturation. ‘Sinicization’ is anything but that: it is the perverse inversion of inculturation, properly understood,” he insisted.

And he explained: “The Catholic faith in China must conform to ‘Xi Jinping Thought’; it must not temper, much less correct, the official ideology of the state. Catholic practice in China must promote the hegemonic goals of the Chinese communist regime.”

“If Catholic witness challenges these goals, or the way in which these goals are promoted through massive domestic human rights abuses and international aggression, the result is persecution, often through the corrupt legal system of which my friend Jimmy Lai is a prominent victim.” 

Jimmy Lai is expected to testify for four additional weeks in this trial which could last several months.