For decades, Jimmy Lai, the media mogul, used his wealth and his newsroom in Hong Kong to criticize Beijing’s authoritarian excesses and give voice to those who hoped for democracy in China.
On Monday, as a court in Hong Kong sentenced him to 20 years in prison, the city made clear that defiance now carries the same price as it does across the border.
The landmark ruling completes a yearslong effort by Beijing to dismantle the influence of a self-proclaimed “troublemaker” whom it blamed for masterminding Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests nearly seven years ago. Critics say Beijing declared Mr. Lai guilty before he could ever receive a fair trial.
The decision reached far beyond one man’s fate. Along with Mr. Lai, six of his former employees at the shuttered Apple Daily newspaper were sentenced to terms of up to 10 years, establishing a grim new benchmark for the city’s once freewheeling media. While the government maintains that these cases are about national security, the scale of the penalties underscores the narrowing window for independent journalism in what was once Asia’s media hub.
By applying the same heavy penalties usually reserved for dissidents on the mainland to a local media tycoon and his editors, Beijing has also accelerated the erosion of a political arrangement that was supposed to preserve Hong Kong’s Western-style liberties, critics say.
“The sentences handed down to Lai and his colleagues are very harsh, even by mainland standards,” said Elaine Pearson, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch. Ms. Pearson noted that only one Chinese dissident has received a longer prison term than Mr. Lai: Ilham Tohti, an economics professor who advocated for the Uyghur minority in China’s far western Xinjiang region and was sentenced to life in prison in 2014.
Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, has waged a far-reaching crackdown on any vestiges of dissent in his country. He has targeted not only human rights activists but also business tycoons, intellectuals and members of the party elite, some of whom have been sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison.
While Hong Kong has a separate legal system from the mainland, Mr. Lai’s prosecution has highlighted how the lines tend to blur when it comes to the city’s national security laws, Ms. Pearson added.
“These national security trials are ultimately serving a political goal of extinguishing dissent and sending a message to anyone who dares to criticize the Chinese Communist Party,” she said.
The sentence is effectively a life term for Mr. Lai, who is 78 years old and in deteriorating health, his family said. “This is a heartbreakingly cruel sentence,” his daughter, Claire Lai, said in a statement. “If this sentence is carried out, he will die a martyr behind bars.”
In court, Mr. Lai betrayed little surprise even as the announcement was met with weeping among some supporters in the public gallery. Dressed in a white shirt and white jacket, Mr. Lai smiled and waved at his wife. He made a heart gesture with his hands to his supporters. In many ways, he behaved like a man who was resigned to a preordained sentence.
The judges wrote that Jimmy Lai deserved severe punishment because he was “no doubt the mastermind” of the conspiracies he was convicted of orchestrating. They also said they had reduced his sentence by 25 months after considering his health issues, which include diabetes and hypertension.
The hearing was held under tight security. Swarms of police officers, many in tactical vests, were stationed outside the courthouse in a working-class neighborhood in Hong Kong’s Kowloon peninsula. An armored vehicle patrolled the perimeter.
People waiting to get into the courthouse had slept outside on mats overnight, swaddling themselves in blankets. The police cordoned the area off with security tape and prevented reporters from interviewing people in line.
Mr. Lai was convicted in December of “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces,” a charge that stemmed from meetings he had held with politicians in the United States. He was also found guilty of conspiracy to publish seditious material in Apple Daily, the now-closed Chinese-language, pro-democracy newspaper he founded in 1995.
China has branded Mr. Lai a traitor seeking to undermine the Communist Party’s rule over Hong Kong and China. They have accused him of being the “black hand” behind the antigovernment protests that engulfed Hong Kong in 2019.
Even in a hyper-capitalistic city filled with self-made millionaires, Mr. Lai’s rags to riches story stood out. He fled a poverty-stricken China as a stowaway when he was a boy and worked his way up the city’s garment factories. That led to the launching of his own brand of casual wear in 1981, which earned him his first fortune.
Mr. Lai had a political awakening after the deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. He angered Beijing by calling Li Peng, the Chinese official who ordered the crackdown, the “son of a turtle’s egg,” a major insult in Chinese.
Legal experts and human rights groups say Mr. Lai had no chance of a fair trial. National security cases are heard by judges handpicked by Hong Kong’s leader, rather than by juries. Communist Party-owned media outlets in the city also declared Mr. Lai guilty well before his trial began.
Western governments have called for the release of Mr. Lai, a British citizen, and described his trial as politically motivated. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said he raised Mr. Lai’s case during a meeting with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing last month. Speaking at a British parliamentary hearing last week, Mr. Lai’s son, Sebastien Lai, criticized Mr. Starmer’s government for not making his father’s release a condition of the visit to China.
Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, on Monday called on Hong Kong to release Jimmy Lai on humanitarian grounds, citing his troubling health. Ms. Cooper said his case was being discussed between the British and Chinese governments at the “highest levels” following Mr. Starmer’s visit, and that the two countries would “rapidly engage further” now that Mr. Lai had been sentenced.
President Trump has said that he has asked Mr. Xi to consider releasing Mr. Lai. David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, described Mr. Lai’s case as an “ongoing conversation” between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi in an interview with Bloomberg TV last month.
Beijing has dismissed calls for Mr. Lai’s release as “blatant interference” in China’s internal affairs.
Beijing’s national security arm in Hong Kong criticized Western critics for calling for Mr. Lai’s release “under the guise of ‘human rights’.” Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s leader, Chief Executive John Lee, said in a statement that the sentence was “deeply gratifying.” He called Lai’s crimes “heinous and utterly despicable.”
China’s Foreign Ministry also issued a statement saying foreign journalists in the city should “respect the independence of Hong Kong’s judicial process” and refrain from “politicizing legal matters.”
Mr. Lai’s only chance of freedom rests on him being exiled to another country, perhaps on medical grounds, said Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation and the author of a book about Mr. Lai called “The Troublemaker.”
“China needs to understand that Lai is more trouble in prison than outside it,” Mr. Clifford added. He argued that Mr. Lai’s imprisonment made a thaw between the United States and China difficult. “Sending him into exile would be in everyone’s interest.”
Berry Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong and Lily Kuo from Taipei.
David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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