I once sat with Jimmy Lai on a remote Hong Kong beach as he told me the story of his life.
How his mother had been taken to a labor camp after the Communist Party came to power in mainland China. How a taste of chocolate given to him by a passenger from Hong Kong had inspired him to stow away on a boat to the British colony. How he had worked his way up from the floor of a glove factory and how he had started Giordano, the casual clothes maker, the name inspired by a napkin from a New York pizza shop. How the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre galvanized his political activism. How he had started the pro-democracy newspaper The Apple Daily with the slogan “An Apple a Day Keeps the Liars Away.”
“I believe in the media by delivering information, you’re actually delivering freedom,” Jimmy told The New York Times in 2020. It’s as precise a defense of an independent press as I’ve ever seen.
From the beach we went for lunch and talked about politics, political philosophy and religious liberty. That was in 2009, a few years after Jimmy had won a showdown with the Hong Kong government over a proposed security law that would have gutted Hong Kong’s freedoms — freedoms that were supposedly guaranteed for 50 years after Britain returned the territory to China in 1997 under the promise of “one country, two systems.”
But it was clear then that Beijing had no intention of keeping its word, and it became clearer after Xi Jinping came to power and accelerated the regime’s assault on Hong Kong’s rights. That culminated in mass protests in 2019 against a heavy-handed extradition law, a violent police crackdown, Jimmy’s arrest the next year and the closing of The Apple Daily the year after that.
On Monday, Jimmy, who has already spent five years in solitary confinement, was sentenced to a 20-year term, a de facto life sentence for an unwell man of 78. Six former Apple Daily senior staff members also received lengthy prison terms. The most generous interpretation of the decision is that Xi intends to use him as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations when he next meets President Donald Trump in Beijing in April. Less generously, that it is simply the reality of a China that has reverted to type under its Maoist leader.
But there’s another side to this story, equally dismaying, which is the abandonment of dissidents as a public cause in the West.
We stopped caring
Fifty or 40 years ago, the free world cared profoundly about names like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Sharansky in the Soviet Union, or Biermann, Havel and Walesa in the captive states of Central Europe. As late as 2007, George W. Bush attended a conference of dissidents in Prague, underscoring their importance to an American foreign policy that paid more than mere lip service to the cause of free societies.
That changed after 2008 when realpolitik — never absent from U.S. foreign policy — roared back. People associated Bush’s “freedom agenda” with the Iraq war, seeing the former either as a cynical cover for an immoral war or as an expensive American delusion that we could plant democracy in barren soils. In 2009, Hillary Clinton went to Beijing as secretary of state and declared that China’s human-rights issues “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises.”
In other words, there was more important business to transact.
Under Trump, U.S. policy became that much more transactional and immoral. The president justifies his chumminess with Vladimir Putin by claiming a moral equivalence between Russia and America — “What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?” as he told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News in 2017. And for all of Trump’s talk about running Venezuela, the regime continues to imprison its political opponents while the administration treats the country as an oil play.
What this crass worldliness misses is that human-rights issues typified by cases like Jimmy’s aren’t distractions from more important business. They are the business.
Re-prioritize liberty
Our confrontation with China today (like our confrontation with Russia, or with the Soviet Union in the Cold War) is not over terms of trade or maritime and territorial disputes. It is about the place of personal liberty in the political order. Every other issue is downstream from that. Respecters of liberty will find ways to work out their differences peacefully. Non-respecters won’t. Any agreement the West signs with Xi or Putin will ultimately be violated the moment it becomes inconvenient to them.
Ditto for Trump — as our trade partners and treaty allies have all found out over the last year.
Marco Rubio issued a brief statement Monday asking China to grant Jimmy a “humanitarian parole.” It won’t do. What Jimmy needs isn’t the mercy of a totalitarian state. It’s a global campaign on his behalf by decent people who understand that in dissidents like him rests the case for human freedom, its nobility and necessity, against remorseless foes. They understand, too, that those dissidents are also the free world’s most effective weapon, because nothing is more dangerous to a dictatorship than the marriage of courage and conscience in the hearts of its own people.
One day, hopefully, we’ll have an administration that gets this.
Bret Stephens is a columnist at The New York Times.
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