Donald Trump has promised to step in and "save" the British-Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai, who is facing life in prison for his vocal opposition to the Chinese regime.
Lai, who arrived in Hong Kong from mainland China at the age of 12, made his fortune in retail. In 1995, he founded Apple Daily, an independent pro-democracy tabloid, soon known for its searing criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. He became a British national in 1996 and, over the past decade, has backed opposition protests against Beijing's draconian suppression of democracy and free speech in the former British territory. He has become a "symbol of Beijing's sweeping national security crackdown" on Hong Kong, said CNN.
Since December 2020, Lai, now 77, has been in a maximum-security prison, mainly in solitary confinement. (Apple Daily was shut down in 2021.) He is now on trial again, accused of two counts of colluding with foreign forces and a separate sedition charge.
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Lai is "in poor health, and the risk of his dying in prison" is real, said Jodie Ginsberg in The Independent. "If he does, Britain's shameful inaction will mean it is, in part, responsible."
Britain's "inertia" on Lai's behalf is "strange", given that our government is led by a former human rights lawyer, and supported by "his close friend from chambers, the Attorney General, Lord Hermer", said former Tory home secretary Suella Braverman in The Telegraph.
Keir Starmer did publicly raise Britain's concerns over Lai's case in his first meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last year. But since then, said Braverman, the British attitude has been "appeasement" and "not diplomacy". The government "seems unwilling to stop Beijing from constructing its gargantuan embassy complex in central London", while the PM "refuses to list China as a threat on the Enhanced Tier of the Foreign Influence Register". And Foreign Secretary David Lammy, "once a great orator against Beijing's crimes, has now retreated into virtual silence".
Lai's latest trial has also "drawn attention to the continued role of judges from the British Commonwealth who sit on Hong Kong's highest court", said Richard Spencer in The Times. Last year, Lord Neuberger, a former UK Supreme Court judge, was part of a panel that upheld unlawful assembly convictions and prison sentences against Lai and others, including Martin Lee Chu-ming, the former leader of Hong Kong's Democratic Party.
"This wasn't how it was supposed to be after Britain passed Hong Kong back to China in 1997," said The Economist. "China promised to preserve freedoms", and allow Hong Kong "to keep a common-law legal system, which set the bar high for putting dissenters in jail".
But a new National Security Law in 2020 "transformed the legal landscape", creating "sweeping, fuzzy categories of crime that Hong Kong had not known before, such as secession, subversion and the collusion of which Mr Lai is now accused".
What next?
Britain needs to signal that "any normalisation of the relationship with China must be conditional" on Lai's immediate release and return to the UK, said The Independent's Ginsberg.
And then there's Trump's apparent willingness to fight Lai's corner. In a recent interview on Fox News Radio, the US president said he was "going to do everything I can to save him. You know, he's a respected guy, a good guy. You can also understand, President Xi would not be exactly thrilled by doing it," so "we'll see what we can do".
A guilty verdict – expected to be handed down in the next few weeks – will "test Trump's resolve to make good on his pledge while trying to clinch a trade deal" with Xi Jinping, said CNN.
