Communist China has sentenced newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison. A longtime resident of Hong Kong and British citizen, Lai was convicted of sedition and collusion with foreign powers. As his son Sebastien Lai notes, this is a de facto death sentence for the ailing 78-year-old.
The Chinese Communist Party’s apparatchiks are celebrating with typically hyperbolic rhetoric. Describing Lai as “evil,” Hong Kong chief executive John Lee Ka-chiu screeched that he “for sure deserves his punishment after all the harm he has done.” The CCP office in Hong Kong said the sentence was the city’s “best Lunar New Year gift.” The Chinese foreign ministry praised the sentence, falsely claiming it is a purely internal matter. In fact, it is in patent breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration — a binding treaty under which Beijing committed to uphold Hong Kong’s democratic character until at least 2047.
This sentence and those inflicted on other members of Lai’s now-aborted Apple Daily newspaper testify to Communist China’s truer nature (disclosure: I formerly had a weekly column with Apple Daily). This repugnant regime cares only for the absolute authority of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It despises freedom of thought, freedom of religion, and human freedom generally. As with Lai and the millions of Chinese Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, it greatly fears those courageous enough to speak freely. But as Xi dominates both the Chinese military and his own people, China’s tyranny will only consolidate.
Sadly, the West is wilfully impotent in the face of this challenge. Lai might be a British citizen, but Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government plainly sees him as an uncomfortable obstacle to its appeasement of Xi in pursuit of new economic investments. The United Kingdom reacted to Lai’s sentence with a mealy-mouthed statement that sought to say something without saying anything of consequence.
Such blatant injustice demands more than robust condemnation.
This attack on Lai represents China’s utterly rapacious breach of the Sino-British declaration. It demands countermeasures, including sanctions on Chinese officials, Western businesses, and morally corrupt Western officials such as former U.K. Supreme Court Chief Justice Lord David Neuberger. As the Washington Examiner has previously reported, many American businesses invest heavily in Hong Kong while hypocritically screeching their commitment to democratic values at home. Their cozy partnership with injustice demands harder consequences for that culpability.
So also must President Donald Trump take a stand. The president has gone increasingly wobbly on China. He is set to visit Beijing in April in a prestigious nod to Xi, one much prized by the dictator.
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Trump should now remind the world that the choice between prioritizing relations with America or China isn’t ultimately dependent on the preferences of economic investments or political predictability. In the end, it is a choice about that most basic natural right: the right to speak freely. The Trump administration cannot credibly continue to condemn European authoritarianism if it is willing to turn a blind eye to Beijing’s far worse tyranny.
Lai’s plight is a warning for all of us. After all, if China is willing to act so furiously toward a long-term Hong Kong resident, just consider what it would do to the rest of us.