#278 The CCP Has No Choice But to Destroy Him | Mark Clifford
01:20:50 Share

On this episode of China Unscripted, the crazy story of how the CCP turned Hong Kong's most successful billionaire into their biggest critic. Plus a bear.

Welcome to China Unscripted. I'm Chris Chappell. I'm Shelley Zhang. And I'm Matt Gnaizda. And joining us today is Mark Clifford. He's the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation and the author of the new book, The Troublemaker, How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident and China's Most Feared Critic. Mark, thank you so much for joining us today. Great to be with you. And thanks so much for your interest in Hong Kong and, of course, in Jimmy Lai.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, we were there for the Umbrella Movement. We were there in 2016. We were there in the extradition protests. That was rough. So Jimmy Lai's trial has just restarted. You've known Jimmy Lai for many, many years. Why do you think the Chinese Communist Party and the Hong Kong government are focusing so much on him?

Well, he is an extraordinary man. So there's a reason that he's seen as the kind of black hand mastermind. I think it's unfair. But look,

Look, he's one of the most successful entrepreneurs of his generation in Hong Kong. He's not just one of 10,000 great Hong Kong entrepreneurs. He is really one of the best. And he had a lot of money. He was a billionaire before they started destroying him and his fortune. So number one, rich businessman. Number two, he had a big media platform. In the space of 20 years, he built one of the most powerful media organizations in the Chinese-speaking world.

Number three, which is perhaps the most difficult for the Chinese Communist Party to deal with. He's a man of principles. He's a man of deep, deep religious faith. But beyond that, he's a man who believes in freedom and he believes in he'll he's willing to go to the mat, even if it means sacrificing his life. So the combination, that trifecta, the money gap.

The media and the principles mean that he's a kind of force that the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't really know how to deal with. And the fact that Jimmy is opposed to them and above all pro-freedom means that just given who they are, they have no choice but to destroy him. It's kind of in their DNA to try to destroy people like Jimmy. Do you think there was a point when.

You know, the writing eventually was on the wall about what was happening in Hong Kong, especially with the national security law in 2020. Was there ever a moment where it was like, okay, either Jimmy Lai has to back down or stay on this path? Like, was there ever a way out for him?

Well, it's interesting. I first met Jimmy in 1993. I profiled him when I was at the Far Eastern Economic Review and we stayed in pretty close touch. I knew him over the years. I was on the board of directors of his media company.

But I think the die was cast back in 1994. Coincidentally, he wrote a piece for Next Magazine, the magazine he founded right after the Tiananmen Square killings, where he attacked the premier of China, Li Peng, called him a butcher of Beijing, call him all sorts of bad things, very intemperate language. And this was on the occasion of Li Peng's first trip to the West since the Tiananmen massacre.

and at that point the chinese authorities started really uh focusing their attention on on jimmy and they started shutting the stores of his giordano clothing chain you know one of the most successful is kind of the precursor of fast fashion of companies like uniclo they started shutting his stores in beijing oh you don't have a license we got a safety problem you know all sorts of the usual nonsense and they thought jimmy would back down i mean every other businessman that they deal with backs down

Jimmy didn't back down. He said, I'll sell the company, sold the clothing company, never looked back. And so I think I think that Die was kind of cast in 1994. Now, of course, there were many, many times Jimmy could have could have taken a different path. He could have not started the newspaper. He could have said, wow, a magazine's enough trouble. I don't need a newspaper anymore.

Started a fabulously successful newspaper. As time went on, I think he became, you know, more and more convinced of the justice of his position, his position really for freedom. And, you know, many people, many people talked to him about leaving. And he said, well,

I would rather be hanging from a lamppost in central Hong Kong than give the communists the satisfaction of saying that I ran away. I mean, it's just the kind of guy he is. Most of us aren't really wired like that, but that's who he is. Wow. It's interesting just thinking about someone who lives a billionaire lifestyle and such a luxurious life, and then they're in like a prison cell, probably a lot of solitary confinement, but just like these gray concrete walls.

uh, drab walls. I just like to, to go from, from that to that is, it's very hard to, for most people to deal with. Well, I don't think really any of us, you know, I mean, he's kind of, I don't know, one in a million, one in a billion in some senses, nobody else like him in China. Um, it actually, it is, I'm sure it's incredibly hard.

physically, but it fits the kind of path that he's taken. I mean, he, as a young man, I mean, he came as a penniless immigrant escaping famine in China. He was 12 years old. His mother said, go to Hong Kong. He was right over the border in China. Go to Hong Kong. You'll probably starve. I mean,

This is a time when 45 million people were starving to death in China. So he left that kind of famine and he found first freedom. He found it was just food. He said he woke up the next day in Hong Kong. There's all this rice and dumplings, there's food. You know, he was sleeping on a factory floor when he moved there. 15 years later, he owned a factory. And so first there's the freedom of food. Then there was the freedom of, of business success and, uh, uh,

eventually a very sybaritic libertine lifestyle. I mean, he had a famously had a pet bear in his house, his mansion when I first met him in there in the early nineties, but in, in Hong Kong and chauffeured Rolls Royce, I mean, whole menagerie besides the pet bear, peacocks, flying Fox, you know, all sorts of things.

Crazy life. And then he got more and more committed to the cause of democracy and along the way converted to Catholicism. And in a way, it's a very fitting life that he's leading now. But I don't mean to I certainly don't mean to make light of it because you mentioned solitary confinement. He's been in prison consecutively more than one thousand four hundred days. Almost all of that time he's been in solitary confinement. You think about that.

you know it's a place here's a guy used to drink the best bordeaux wine you know he just you know eat whatever you know he's real food lover whether it's truffles or you know char siu you know barbecued pork in hong kong and so he went from living just a life where he could have whatever he wanted to one where his every movement is regulated by the prison authorities he can't choose when to turn his light on you know let alone when or what he can eat um it's all regulated and yet within that

Think he's found freedom. His reading is is almost exclusively. I think it is exclusively Catholic Theological works he paints allies itself taught well not completely self talks. He has he did study art Does a lot of paintings all religious themed Christ on the cross the the Virgin Mary So within the you know, he prays a lot. He has to do prison labor. So it's it's quite a journey but

from everything we can tell, he's spiritually and mentally very, very free. However, it is taking a real physical toll on him. I mean, he's 76 years old. He had diabetes when he went into prison. Since then, he's had COVID, suffered COVID during his prison stay. He's had a cataract operation. I don't want to say it was botched, but it was done in a prison hospital. And

by all accounts, he can't really see very well anymore. So he's lost a lot of weight. Authorities won't even allow photographers to take a picture of him. The last image we've seen was taken surreptitiously by Associated Press photographer back in the summer of 2023. But by all accounts, he's in court now and he's apparently lost a lot of weight. Yeah, he's 76. I mean,

You know, I think anybody would be suffering, but you go through that kind of hardship at that age with with pre-existing health conditions. And it's rough. I think just a quick digression, but I think it's always interesting with a story like Jimmy Lai. You know, part of the communist message is that, you know, capitalism and all these billionaires are oppressive and they keep the people down. But in a story like him, like you see, he fled communism where he was starving.

became successful and became this great person. And then again, communism comes back and oppresses. It's totally ironic. And yeah, he, yeah, I think most of us would have left, you know, I left, I mean, uh, you know, I wasn't in as much danger as he was. Um, you know, it's, it's, it is, it's unbelievable, but you know, the story of Jimmy Lai is really the story of Hong Kong. And that's why, I mean, he, you know, it's kind of chosen to take on

kind of the suffering of the Hong Kong people in a way. I mean, he said, you know, kind of like, I got you, I helped get you into this. I'm not, I'm not leaving now, but the story of, you know, people fled China after the 1949 communist revolution, because they didn't want to be, they didn't want to be starving. They didn't want to be oppressed. Hong Kong got a couple of million refugees over the years. It got, I think about three or 4 million people who fled communist China and

Then China comes back in 1997 when the British left the colony and turned it over to the Chinese. All sorts of wonderful promises about how Hong Kong was going to be freer than ever, its existing way of life would stay the same. And instead,

Here we are again, 75 years after the birth of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and they've smothered Hong Kong from, as you say, people who fled that very system and whose kids grew up in an atmosphere and a spirit of freedom, expecting more freedom, expecting democracy. Instead, they're just being smothered by a thuggish authoritarian government. It's just unbelievable. More butchers of Beijing. Shelley, your question.

I was going to ask if Jimmy Lai is allowed to have any communication with the outside world. So that's a great question. Well, I have to say, as his biography, it was very tough writing a biography of somebody that you can't communicate with. So he can have very limited communication. He's allowed to meet two to four times a month for half hour meetings. They could be, I guess, with anybody who gets permission. In fact, it's with his wife and his children, several of whom are still in Hong Kong.

It seems that authorities have stopped letters from from reaching him. I know I have not communicated with him because of the whole national security law. I mean, what he's being charged for basically is talking to foreigners. And I mean, far more important people than me, people like Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. But this whole issue of collusion, even his son, Sebastian, who's living in Taiwan, can't go back. His father hasn't.

He wasn't able to go to Sebastian's wedding, hasn't been able to see Sebastian's granddaughter or Sebastian's daughter, his granddaughter. Sebastian couldn't visit Hong Kong without risk of arrest. The Hong Kong government has attacked him simply for standing up for his father. You think of that trying to rip apart families like that. So.

yeah, the short answer is sure. He can talk to his wife, Teresa through plexiglass, incredibly monitor conversations two, three, maybe four times a month for a half an hour. And then at the end of that, it's finished. He gets limited reading material. As I say, I it's, it's illegal, but they seem to have shut the flow of letters. We can't exactly track that because you don't know what's getting through and what's not. So

Very, very restricted. Of course, he's able in limited cases to to talk to his lawyers and have access to them, such as at the moment when the trial of his national security law trial has just resumed. He's a Catholic. Has do you know if he's been given access to the Eucharist? Excellent question. He's now been denied that in recent months.

Really? But, um, he has an international legal team that's working on his behalf and they surfaced that issue, uh, which is a tremendous concern to his family. Um, and the Hong Kong government came back with this really weird response saying that, um,

He hadn't asked for it and no priest had asked to give him communion and nobody wanted to cause any trouble. It's like, come on, you're in it. You know how many there are many Catholics in Hong Kong. He's very, very close to Cardinal Zen, who's who's aging and would have a difficult time, but was able to to.

administer Holy Communion in the prison? And I'm sure there are many priests who'd be willing to go in to meet with Jimmy and give him the Eucharist. And the answer is no. And then the Hong Kong government is kind of admitting it and kind of lying about it. It's completely illegal. And it's inhumane because his Catholic faith and the love of his wife and family, and I believe the support of people around the world is

This is really what's keeping him going. So I mean, it's cruel beyond belief to deny him communion. It's so crazy what like what's happened in the last few years with Hong Kong courts. Right. Because, you know, in the beginning and I mean, like even the you know, after the handover, the first, you know, decade plus of of Hong Kong under the one country, two systems, it's still had a pretty independent court.

And it seems that starting around 2019, 2020, especially after the national security law, things just went crazy. Like, how is it that judges who presumably have been educated in the Hong Kong legal system for many, many years are now willing to preside over a case with...

What can only be described as trumped up charges, I think collusion with foreign forces and collusion to publish seditious materials. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. So like how does that happen in the Hong Kong court system so quickly and so brutally?

I think that's a question that we're going to be trying to puzzle out for many years. It does not speak well to the integrity of the judges who are seeing these cases. It's interesting. So you mentioned the national security law. This was a pivotal piece of legislation that came in on June 30th, 2020. It basically criminalized dissent. It took away, there are many rights, such as right to trial by jury. That was guaranteed.

in a document that the Chinese communists themselves promulgated, the so-called basic law. It's a kind of mini constitution that underpinned the handover to Chinese rule. So trial by jury, the right to pick your own lawyer, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, I mean, all the things that we would take for granted in a Western society.

One by one, they're just knocked down by the national security law. So Jimmy wanted to have his own lawyer from abroad, which is a common practice in Hong Kong. It's a small jurisdiction and you want to get the best lawyer you can, especially if money is no object. And he tried to hire a guy named, he engaged at King's Council, Tim Owen, who'd practiced in Hong Kong, was trying a case in Hong Kong.

The government just rewrote the rules with the help of Beijing to deny Jimmy his lawyer. And then they canceled Tim Owens visa and couldn't come to Hong Kong anymore. The right to trial by jury. Well, national security law says, well, you know, if you want to, if jurors wouldn't feel safe.

like as if the defendant were going to do something, then we can just have trial by judges. That's not too good because trial by jury is one of the great innovations of common law jurisdiction. I mean, you should have the right to be judged by your peers and not by some judges in a hanging court.

Oh, and so they didn't just take any judges in Hong Kong. They have a secret panel of national security law judges. Only, we don't know if there are, you know, 10 of them or a thousand of them. It seems to be a pretty small number. It's the same judges who keep handling these national security law cases. So they pick, they pick quizlings, they pick compliant. I mean, they really pick despicable, uh, people who will just, you know, sacrifice their principles. I mean, these judges have acted as prosecutors really in, in many of these cases. Um,

You know, the question is like, how did this happen? I guess you can always find a few weak people. I mean, very few of us are going to have the principles and the heroism of somebody like Jimmy Lai. Most of us would like to think we at least have some principles, but it's always possible to find some people who

you know, for reasons of career advancements. I'm one of these guys, these judges had actually been reprimanded in the past. He was just such a, you know, so obviously prejudiced against a democracy protester. And so you pick weak people, you pick compliant people, and then you say it's all rule of law when it's pretty clear that they're acting under the explicit or implicit instruction of Beijing. They have about a 97% conviction rate in the national security law cases. And

you know, it's hard to, it's, it's impossible to imagine that Jimmy wouldn't be convicted. So I don't know if that really answers your question, except to say, excuse me, I don't think there's really anywhere in the, in the world in the last century, that's gone from 60 to zero in terms of freedom without like a war or a revolution or something like this. They've just done it. The guys are still wearing their wigs, the guys and the women, you know, it still looks like it's a, you know, a British court or something. And yet the principal's

that they've undercut are just, it's almost beyond belief.

It's so fast, so harsh that you can't even really comprehend it. I'll just finish this one final example. Jimmy got, I think it was 14 months in prison because he attended a commemoration of the June 4th Tiananmen killings. Every year those were held in Hong Kong. It was the only place in China where we could hold them. The last...

One that was freely allowed to be held was 2019. I was there. Some of you might have been there. 160,000 people or so. Big, big demo or commemoration. Very somber vigil. The next year, because of COVID, the government would not give permission. Jimmy decided to go to Victoria Park, where the commemoration is always held. Got out of his car, refused to speak to the press, refused to make a statement. He lit a candle. He said a prayer.

Silently got back into his car for that. He was convicted convicted of inciting a riot Can you imagine inciting a riot and the judges said well, you know, you're a famous person Basically people respect you Therefore you coming incited a riot. There was no violence. There was no riot, but that's the kind of so-called justice that we have in Hong Kong and

This is the Hong Kong government says that Jimmy and others are being convicted according to law. This is complete nonsense. It's ruled by law. There's no more rule of law in Hong Kong.

It reminds me of when that blind lawyer, Chen Guangchuan, was convicted of blocking traffic or whatever. It's just like, sure, you've incited a riot. There was no riot. There was no protest even, right? So it was just, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they just make stuff up. I mean, it would be kind of like Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka meets George Orwell's 1984. I mean, you can't imagine that this is really happening. I mean,

Yeah, I'll stop there. I'll let you ask some more questions. That's actually a really good way to describe China. Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka meets 1984. That's horrifying. Now, you lived in Hong Kong for over two decades, so you must have seen this transformation happen. Can you tell us about your experiences with that, anything that stands out in your mind as being like you seeing what was coming?

Well, yeah, I mean, I moved there in 1992 for after five years in South Korea and South Korea had just gone through this remarkable transformation from it wasn't technically a military dictatorship when I moved there in first half of 1987, but pretty close to, well, what it is today, a thriving democracy. And by the way, if you told me the New York Times is going to move its editorial record

Asian editorial headquarters from Hong Kong to Seoul. If you told anybody that in the late 1980s, they would have thought you were nuts. But in fact, that's what's happened. So at that point, Hong Kong, I go down to Hong Kong. It's just it was the land of freedom. I mean, you know, dozens of Chinese language newspapers, a robust English language media, a couple or three, maybe at that point, English language newspapers, newspapers.

You know, it's kind of like anything goes. Now, there wasn't democracy. There was freedom, but there wasn't democracy. And I came a month before a remarkable man named Chris Patton, Lord Patton, became the last governor. He said, forget it. I'm not wearing the plumes and all the finery of British colonials. We're going to throw that off symbolically, but also we're going to we're going to throw it off. We have elections. They had the first kind of baby territory wide elections a few months before Patton came in.

And he introduced, you know, something close to universal suffrage.

Close. Well, halfway there in terms of electing the city council. I mean, think about it. Electing the city council, which didn't even have the power to initiate spending bills or anything, is a very top down administrative government. So Patton set the bar pretty high. But Hong Kong people were already well educated. They were increasingly traveling. They knew about the world. They were ready. They were as ready for freedom as anybody. And hundreds of thousands of them had gone out after the Tiananmen killings.

Then the Chinese came. And first of all, they were very angry that Patton had kind of wrecked their so-called through train. They had hoped that the British colonialists would would keep a kind of repressed political system. And Patton blew all that out of the water. That's a we can get back to that and why he did that. But I think he was a remarkable man and he made up for a lot of the deficiencies during the 156 years of British colonial rule.

But whatever deficiencies Hong Kong had during that time, it did have rule of law. And that's something Jimmy Lai talks about all the time. It's the first thing he talks about. You know, he's a great human rights campaigner. He's a, you know, unbelievable, I guess you could say dissident. But, um,

It's interesting because he talks about it all always in terms of Western values. He talks about rule of law, freedom of speech. So these are the values that Jimmy inculcated in the time that he since he'd arrived in 1961 until the British left. And so at first it was OK. I think we were all trying to give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt. They were trying to keep their hands off things. But of course, they needed to.

They needed to control. They don't know what to do other than to control. And they, in 2003, tried to come in with a national security law. Not surprisingly, half a million people went out in the streets and said, no way. Now, that was when Jimmy and his newspaper, Apple Daily, started becoming more overtly political. They always fought against corruption. They had always...

you know, worked, worked for democracy. But in 2003, they actively worked to get people out in the streets. And I think that's when he really became a target. So, you know, after 2003, you saw, you know, the tensions building because it was clear that China was not going to keep its promises for to move towards more democracy, which, by the way, just really meant electing the mayor and having full universal suffrage for the city council.

So we just we just saw things, you know, getting increasingly tense. You guys mentioned the 2014 umbrella movement when for 79 days students camped out in front of the government headquarters. Jimmy was there every one of those 79 days. He was tear gassed. He was arrested.

But then in 2019, I think what happened is the scene in Beijing, seeing two million people come out in the streets and then at the end of all this getting wiped out in the election by Democrats. Again, these were very low level elections there for the so-called district council officers like a ward. These politicians had no power other than to clean up the litter in their neighborhood. I don't want to demean that. I'm just saying this was not a threat to Chinese rule. You had an overwhelming victory by the Democrats there.

And I think Beijing just said, "We can't handle it. We lost Hong Kong." And rather than talking to the people of Hong Kong, having some negotiations, they never had one negotiation.

So rather than trying to meet the legitimate demands of the Hong Kong people, again, I think it's kind of in the communist DNA. When you're in trouble, crack down. And so it was really that period from 2019, 2020 and beyond when things went from being difficult to being absolutely impossible. And again, this rapid crushing in less than five years, one of the freest cities in the world to one of the least free. I think it's COVID was really a blessing for the

CCP in terms of like their ability to crack down on Hong Kong. Like we, the last time we were in Hong Kong was October of 2019. We went to, we had been there in the summer earlier to cover the protests when they started. And then we were there back again to cover the international day. But we left on the day that there was an anti-mask protest because the Hong Kong government was trying to keep people from wearing masks.

during the protests. And so it's kind of funny that like the anti-mask protests and then only a few months later, it's like mandatory masks, you know, no gathering more than two or three people in public, all the stuff that was really helped the CCP crack down on Hong Kong in a way that they may not have been able to do before.

so smoothly if they hadn't had that ability to stop people from gathering or to you know the quarantine camps all that stuff and also The world was pretty focused on Hong Kong when it was happening and then go vid everyone was focused on COVID Yeah, it's it's interesting whether or not you believe that COVID came out of a Chinese lab or came out you know just from the wild and

And as you were saying, it's almost like they couldn't have invented something that would have helped them more. I mean, for all the reasons that you both have just mentioned, took the world's eyes off Hong Kong. It allowed, you know, so they say, oh, sorry, you can't have any more protests. COVID, you know. Oh, yeah, it's funny. The thing of going from, you know, you can't wear a mask or we're going to throw you in jail to you must wear a mask or we're going to throw you in jail. That's typical. The kind of, you know, complete policy flip flops we see in a communist system.

So in addition to Jimmy Lai, whose trial has started, there's also this month 45 other pro-democracy – well, protesters are not even protesters. Some of them are just more activists or people who believe in democracy have been sentenced to pretty severe –

Legislative officials like they were in the government right right so like that That's a lot of people who just got some pretty harsh sentences that Benny Tai got ten years other people got four or more years But he was up for life. So such so so nice Ten years. Yeah. Yeah

um it's yeah i think as shirley was saying it's most of them were elected officials many of them were district counselors who had won in that that previous november's election um

They actually were guilty of, well, subversion of state power. What did that mean, really? It meant that they ran an unofficial election primary to try to get the strongest candidates to run for legislative office. So you think about this. You've got lawyers, professors like Benny Tai, journalists, activists, social workers. I mean, just engaged citizens. They're the kind of people in our country we'd celebrate them for being involved. You want to lock them up. You just destroy their lives, destroy their family lives.

So that there was 75 people, I think, initially picked up of whom 47 were charged, 45 convicted. Yeah. Cumulatively, they got 250 years. And yeah, we're supposed to feel grateful the sentences weren't longer. I mean.

you know the guy who brought me out to to asia for the first time editor philip bowring from the far eastern economic review his wife claudia moe um former journalist 67 almost 68 years old she's been held in jail for almost four years for what she she gave up her british citizenship because she was patriotic enough that she wanted to run for the legislative council in hong kong she did successfully and won many times

These are the kind of people that you're trying to destroy. So then you're going to come back and have a international financial, global financial leaders summit, as Hong Kong did in the middle of November, and tell the heads of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that everything's good and getting better. And Hong Kong just had a little trouble a few years ago. Don't worry. Nothing to do with you. You can still make money. I'm sorry. Global financial centers don't have political prisoners. Full stop. Do you think that's a message Goldman Sachs and others are taking?

Well, we're trying to make sure and we're going to increasingly try to make sure that they hear that and that they hear that from from people in the US. I mean, it's just it's inconscionable that they're there. I mean, look, they can have their business there. In fact, business is not good. Although they go and say nice things in Hong Kong, many financial firms are actually quietly pulling out. Nobody announces when they leave.

But I think it's outrageous that David Solomon and people from from Apollo, from Morgan Stanley, you know, really leading financial firms are going to go and basically give aid and comfort to a repressive regime. Again, you show me any other global financial center where they're throwing political prisoners in jail. I mean, Hong Kong went from zero to over the past five years, 1900, more than one thousand nine hundred people.

people have been jailed on political charges. And I mean, it goes on. There's still 7,000 people who haven't been tried yet. I mean, you're telling me this is a normal financial center that's on a par with London and New York as it used to be? You can't have both. You want a financial center, you need free flow of information. You might not care about democracy. You've got to have free information. If you can't run a newspaper, I mean, they're putting people in jail now because they've got a t-shirt with some slogan that

that the government doesn't like. You know, yes, I don't know if Goldman's hearing it yet. We Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation ran a full page ad in The New York Times decrying this this despicable behavior. And we'll try to hold them to account. I mean, I can't really influence what Xi Jinping does or what the Hong Kong government does. But I can I and my colleagues can do what we can to hold Western firms accountable for

for buttressing this evil regime. And it is evil. I mean, you don't strip nonviolent people of their money and especially of their freedom for no reason and then just kind of get away with it and get help from Wall Street in particular. I'm wondering what you think of what's happened to the media in Hong Kong because you said you came with the Far Eastern Economic Review and you've been involved in some of the other English language papers in Hong Kong.

What do you think is happening now to the media? Well, it's sad. I mean, there's no free media. I was the editor in chief of both the South China Morning Post and the Standard, where I was also the publisher. And, you know, I'd be lying if I said there was no political pressure. This was back in the early 2000s. But, you know, it was OK. It was tolerable. You could you could have pretty, pretty gutsy and good reporting. By the way, Apple Daily, Jimmy Lai's newspaper was a lot.

Got to hear than the English language press and they had a lot more people and they just they just had an ethos of really pushing under uncovering corruption, uncovering all sorts of wrongdoing as well as pushing for democracy. Those days are finished. You know, you can't there's no real criticism there.

you know i don't really want to name names but if you look at some of the coverage uh of um of jimmy lye's trial in the english language press it's it's pathetic it's just so slanted and um you know it's just you know it's sounding like a government mouthpiece i mean there was a an english language publication who came out of china called china daily that was uh the english language uh version was set up around the time of the the handover from britain to

China in 1997. And look, that's fine. It's a Chinese government paper. You read it. You want to see what the government line is. That's fine. Unfortunately, the South China Morning Post, which was one of the leading publications, one of the leading English language newspapers in Asia, it's become a lot more like it had ambitions after it was bought by Alibaba. I had ambitions to become a kind of Chinese language on New York Times. Well, sorry to say, it's become a lot more like People's Daily than the New York Times.

Well, I actually do like China Daily because they criticized us as being disgraceful anti-China garbage. Good. You must be doing something right. I mean, you know what the government line is, right? We did put that on a T-shirt. So for – there are still some media companies that are I guess maybe trying to do maybe not exactly what Apple Daily is doing. But like I'm thinking of Hong Kong Free Press, which is in English.

uh the the epic times which is uh in chinese there those are both not pro-beijing right why have they not been targeted as hard as apple daily or have they been in we just it's it hasn't been publicly reported very much well let me say i mean you know i kind of loath to say too much except that i would say that the people who are running those publications um

Are they feel that they're skating on very thin ice and they just they don't. I mean, when we're running Apple Daily, we didn't wake up every morning thinking of, you know, we push the button on this story. Is it going to mean that we're going to be shut down? I think so.

And there are unclear lines, but there are lines that you can't go beyond now. And I think that there are other places, by the way, in Chinese that are doing decent reporting, good reporting. I think they're trying to keep it more narrow, trying to keep it away from politics, trying to be very factual and, you know, work within constraints that, you know, didn't exist 10 years ago. So I don't want to make it sound like it's...

Well, it's not as bad as mainland China, but there's much, much less room for maneuver. And I think day to day, these news organizations just, you know, they just don't know how much longer they're they don't know when things might end. And that's the other thing that's just.

you know, quite unbelievable. We were killed when John Lee, who's now the chief executive or the mayor, was the secretary for security. And he sent a letter to us under his authority as the secretary for security saying that he suspected, he had reason to believe that we'd broken the national security law. No evidence, didn't mention a single article, but he said, because he thought that,

He was going to freeze our bank accounts. So, you know, we had 600,000, think of it, 600,000 digital subscribers. We were doing pretty well. We were just in the middle of actually really were far along on the road of making the transition from paper to digital. Overnight, zero cash coming in because the banks were threatened with jail for their executives if they processed any credit card payments for us. We couldn't pay the electricity bill. We couldn't pay ink. We couldn't do anything. And by the way,

That case that John Lee's beliefs have actually not been tested in court. They never found Apple Daily guilty. I guess that's in a way implicitly what they're trying to do now. But you think of one man say so just shut things down. You know, we've seen Stan News and other publications that have just been shut down. NGOs shut down under a variety of legal or quasi legal pretexts. So.

I'm really happy that things like Hong Kong Free Press, Epoch Times and some other ones are doing what they can, but the parameters are much, much narrower and their position is much, much more perilous. What was the moment that you realized you needed to get out of Hong Kong?

Well, I didn't actually. And that's a really interesting question because it was something that people were talking about after the national security law was announced. And even some some before that, I had a monthly column in the South China Morning Post. I was running a group called the Asia Business Council. And people would say to me, even some of my board members at the Asia Business Council said,

uh, because I was doing a lot publicly with, with Jimmy, especially after the national security law came in and they were very nice about it. Like, are you okay? I'm like, I'm fine. But I think implicitly I realized later they were like, are you really okay? Are you really sure what you're doing? And, um, I actually, uh, it's

kind of randomly, but I thought, well, maybe I should just kind of lighten up a bit. And I, I've been in Hong Kong 28 years and I, I got a shipment together and moved, you know, kind of books and furniture and art just in case I needed to leave in a hurry. Then that shipment arrived and I thought, well, I should go and, you know, unload the shipment. And it was during COVID. So it was, you know, kind of mixed up with all the,

the covid material and then a couple weeks later jimmy's jailed and they mentioned my name and honestly i probably still would have gone back except i didn't want to go through two or three weeks of quarantine and then you know of course after they raided apple and wrecked it there was no thought of going back but um it's it's really fun funny um you know people often use the analogy of a frog in boiling water as the water gets warmer and warmer and the frog you know doesn't jump until it's too late actually

A lot of people have done research on this. Frogs do jump. They actually get out really quickly. It's people that don't get out because you can't believe that this is actually happening. I mean, you look around, seems like the same people, same judges, same courts. They're wearing the wigs. That's all the same veneer of respectability. And then bam, 250 people in a newsroom take off your, your leadership. Oh, six months, eight months later, 500. Yeah. Yeah.

police in the newsroom. You can't believe it's so unreal. And then all of a sudden, Jimmy lies in jail. All of a sudden, 70, you know, 75 people are dragged away. All of a sudden your newspaper shut down. I mean, it's just like one thing at a time. And it's like, you're in shock. You actually just can't process it. You can't imagine that a place that was this free would just be throwing some of its finest citizens in jail. It's, it's, it's, you know, so I can't claim any prescience at all. Actually,

You know, if things had gone another way, maybe I wouldn't have left. I don't know. So when you were when Apple Daily was raided by the Hong Kong police, you were not in Hong Kong anymore. The first time they were raided, which was August 10th, 2020, five, six weeks after the national security law came in place, I was in Hong Kong. And we had an emergency board of directors meeting by phone.

partly because of COVID, partly because of where people were. During the course of this emergency board meeting, it became clear I was the only board member in Hong Kong not in custody. So that does get you thinking. But by the time that the newspaper was closed, so it was eight months later, I guess, or 10 months later, in June 2021, I was in the States.

I know. Oh, go ahead. No, no. It was just it was just again, it's just surreal. I was watching the live streaming of. Yeah. You know, first police coming in. I didn't see that live. But, you know, as they were as they were shutting the newspaper down and we we printed a million copies and we were trying to keep the any way we could to keep the paper going. But.

you know, couldn't pay the bills, couldn't pay the staff bills. And then then the government to their it's just unbelievable. They went after us. I think I still have I don't know if they're still open or not for different investigations against us as directors like we wrecked the company. So I asked some of the, you know, my persecutors like,

You think we as directors didn't do a good job for the company? Well, what about the fact that, you know, we couldn't have access to our bank accounts? What about the fact that the labor department was suing us because we didn't pay our employees? We had plenty of cash, but we couldn't access the bank accounts. The government's like, that's not our problem. You didn't pay your employees. It's this kind of petty lawfare where you use your

use the veneer of legality to, to accomplish a political end. So it was just an unbelievable and, and, you know, horrific, uh, experience. I mean, it was traumatic for me, but more so, you know, you have kind of survivor's guilt. I mean, besides Jimmy, there's six other people who Apple daily colleagues, Apple and next digital, the parent company who, um, who've pled guilty and are essentially being held hostage to Jimmy's trial. Um,

I don't know why they haven't sentenced them. They've been holding them for three plus years. So yeah, very, very traumatic, even though me personally, I don't really suffer in the sense of, you know, being jailed or anything. I know a lot of prominent Hong Kong activists who have who are living in exile. The Hong Kong government has put pretty hefty bounties on their head. Have they done anything like that for you?

It's very interesting. They I mean, they've really targeted ethnic Chinese. So one of those, my colleague, Francis Hoy, who is our advocacy advocacy coordinator based in D.C. I mean, I mean, the FBI ended up arresting someone who had been stalking her a few years earlier, actually, when she was a student up in the Boston area.

And then she's got a bounty on her head. Her family gets harassed. I mean, there are 13 of them. They each have one million Hong Kong dollars. It's about $128,000 US bounty, if you know.

you know you turn francis in and get her back to be successfully prosecuted in hong kong i mean it's a joke i think it's a performative thing but it's just very interesting they've they they target uh ethnic chinese um it's a very it's a very this the other thing ccp has a very racist policy towards many things so jimmy lye is a british citizen just take one example that i happen to know about he's a british citizen full british citizen never had chinese papers since

the day he left China in 1961 to illegally come into Hong Kong, always had British papers, British passport, nothing Chinese. The Chinese will not give consular access to the UK, the United Kingdom consulate in Hong Kong. He has the right to see a UK citizen in prison. They say he's a Chinese citizen. How is he a Chinese citizen? Never, you know, doesn't have Chinese papers, but oh, looks Chinese, born in China. He's ours forever. So the, I don't know, it's, it's,

it's just strange. Uh, the fact that they kind of, you know, don't go after far and long may it last. I mean, I don't want them coming after me. Um, and, uh, thankfully as far as I know, they haven't, uh, any reaction to the book that you have coming out? Well, it's not out yet. So let's see. Um, uh, they, they, maybe that'll get you the bounty. Um,

If so, please don't try to collect it. Well, this is a digital interview. We can't actually lay hands on you. Well, so actually, let me ask you about your book. So the title of your book is The Troublemaker. I was going to ask you why you called it that, but I think it's fairly obvious. It's a book, of course, about the sort of life story of Jimmy Lai. And it starts with him

uh it's a it's a crazy story really like it starts with him being born and his family originally in in guangdong province they were not a poor family they actually were you know pretty successful business people his father was was successful but when the communists came that success became a liability absolutely yeah and what what happened after that

Yeah. Well, by the way, I call it the troublemaker because that's how Jimmy Lai described himself to me. And we were talking one time and it's it it kind of unwittingly echoes this great civil rights icon, John Lewis, who said, make trouble, make good trouble. And it's and so I didn't want to make it sound like somehow he was tied up with John Lewis. And then

Really surprisingly to me in the course of my research, I found out, in fact, Jimmy did meet John Lewis. And in fact, had John Lewis make a video for the students of the protesters in 2019 imploring them?

to remain nonviolent. And so there's actually a picture in the book of Jimmy, another Hong Kong human rights leader, Martin Lee and John Lewis in the US Capitol. And so, you know, there is that sense of, OK, make good trouble. But, you know, let's keep the moral high ground. Jimmy is a huge proponent of nonviolence and really had some issues with the violence that some of the students engaged or some of the protesters engaged in in 2019.

And I guess maybe that's getting back to your question. Yeah. So he's born, as he said, it's a liability to be born into a rich family. Their house was taken away by the authorities. And, you know, all these people moved in. They're reduced to, you know, living in poverty. His mother is a crazy story.

His mother was the second wife of a guy who'd married into a prominent shipping family. And she and even Jimmy had to call her mother number two. I mean, his mother was really kind of humiliated in these circumstances. She's a peasant woman who was brought in to bear more children and take, you know, almost well act as I don't want to say a slave, but, you know, really act to support this other family. The first wife died. His mother was still badly treated. But the irony is she's a peasant. But

you know, very poor background, humble background. But because she married into a rich family after the revolution, she was treated as a class enemy and sent off to a labor camp. You know what I mean? So it's just like one thing after another. And I think the shock of as a young boy, seeing the family in very young boys, you know, still had a little bit of wealth. And then the, you know, the trauma of the revolution, his father left for Hong Kong, his mother stayed. She's in and out of these cities.

It may be a little strong call them labor camps because she seems to have been able to come home on weekends. But that's Jimmy always called it a labor camp. Wait, horrific conditions. Jimmy barely went to school after the age of I'm not really sure, seven or eight. Nobody really seemed sure he he repeated at least one one grade. I mean, so he doesn't even have a primary school education.

His sister, he's got a twin sister. She had a photographic memory breeze through school. And Jimmy, you know, they're both brilliant, but wired very, very differently. And maybe she's more conventional. Also a very successful entrepreneur in Canada, having lived in Africa and America. I mean, it's really a crazy, crazy story of the twins. But my book is really only about Jimmy and

And so he's this fidgety kid and he's he's like working the black market. He's you know, they're using him because he's like six, eight years old. You know, he's working as a porter at the Guangdong railway station. And it's the famine in China. There are 45 million people who are dying because of stupid Maoist communist policies that, you know.

led to hunger. It's the greatest man-made famine in history in terms of the number of people it killed. And it was a political famine, a man-made famine. He's working as a porter. Guy gives him a tip and then he reaches in pocket and gives him a half-eaten bar of chocolate. And Jimmy kind of a little furtive because he doesn't want to just eat in front of the guy. He turns around and has a bite of the chocolate. He goes, what is this? And it's chocolate. He goes,

where are you from from hong kong he goes hong kong must be heaven if you've got chocolate and so that was almost like this proustian moment for him and he he really want he was 11 then begged his mother for a year of course his mother's not going to let this little kid go to hong kong

Things were so bad in China, his mother finally said, OK, go. And he managed to get a one way visa to Macau and went there and then got on a fishing boat and illegally entered Hong Kong. And so he's sleeping in a factory, teaching himself English by reading the dictionary and talking to older people who helped him out a little bit.

A dozen years after he gets to Hong Kong, you know, he's sleeping on a factory on the table in the factory. A dozen years later, he owns a factory. Very quickly becomes one of the largest sweater manufacturers in Hong Kong, if not in Asia. Selling to companies like the Limited and other, I mean, big American companies. First JCPenney, Kmart, Sears, then, you know, the Limited and others.

Then he gets kind of bored with manufacturing, decides he's going to start a clothing company, a retail clothing company. So he starts this, you know, kind of fast fashion company. Guy named Tadashi Inai comes down from Japan, learns from him, starts Uniqlo. Today, Uniqlo, Tadashi Inai is worth $35 billion. Uniqlo is like revolutionized the global fashion industry. Tadashi Inai was Jimmy's student. He wanted Jimmy to invest, you know, to, yeah, invest in the Hong Kong, in the Japan,

Japanese operation. Then Jimmy gets bored with with clothing. He's about to start a fast food operation. It was kind of his idea was actually what Chipotle ended up doing a few years later. Lots of ingredients, giving the consumer the illusion of choice, but not actually, you know, but making it very efficient. He's an amazing entrepreneur. And that's one of the things that, even though I've known him for three decades, really came through in the research for the book.

Then Tiananmen comes and he goes, I forget fast food. I'm going to go into media. I think that's the thing. It goes to communist parties. You know, think about the Berlin Walls falling. Soviet Union's on its last legs. Jimmy's like media is freedom. He saw CNN. He saw technology, said media transparency, freedom. So he's such a Chinese patriot. That's the irony of this trial.

he really believed in economic reform and thought it was going to lead to political reform so he starts media people his friends are like what do you know about media because you know i'm smart i read time economist fortune i can do this and harvard business review this newspaper he starts next it's less than a year after i guess about a nine months after the tiananmen killing starts next

Then he starts, when I met him, he started Next, but he hadn't started the newspaper. And honestly, you know, as a humble working journalist for a weekly magazine, I'm like, "You wanna start a newspaper?" Like, you know, and it's like the Chinese communists are coming. He said, "Look,

i've got i've got a product it's called democracy every other newspaper owner in hong kong is scared of the chinese communists they're pulling back they're self-censoring i'm going to go full force for democracy but he didn't write a boring political paper he had scandal he had starlets and stars he had economic columns on the free market he had democracy and anti-corruption i mean he had all sorts of stuff um

And, um, yeah, then one thing led to another, but it is, it's an unbelievable story. He converted to Catholicism a week after, uh, the handover under the influence of his wife and some other close friends like Mark Martin Lee and Cardinal Zen. And, um, slowly Apple daily and next magazine emerged in the absence of any democracy emerged as kind of the opposition force. And, uh,

I think, you know, this combination of Jimmy's principles, the force of his personality, his money, his media platform. I mean, as far as the guys up in Beijing are concerned, the leaders in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, he's public enemy number one. They just couldn't get him to back down. Yeah, it's interesting when you talk about that, the combination of him being a businessman and an activist. Yeah.

Not many of them. No, no. And we've interviewed many Chinese dissidents and we've talked about their stories and they always start from a place of kind of powerlessness in a communist society, right?

Like you start off as a barefoot lawyer, you start off as, you know, somebody who's just advocating for people who have been mistreated in some way by the government, but you're, they're not people who have power. It's not like Jack Ma is, you know, coming out to talk about democracy. And so that, yes, the framing of this makes, yeah, what you say about Jimmy, like he's so unique. Yeah.

Yeah, I just and you can't believe it. So he wrote that column that I alluded to before about about Li Peng and in 1994, and he happened to be over at my house for dinner, which happened a lot. I mean, I don't want to overplay it. We wasn't like we were bosom buddies or anything. But yeah, I used to see him pretty often. And he had just written that column. And the Chinese had just shut his stores down in Beijing. And we spent the entire evening talking about this. And

And what did he do? He doubled down. The next month, he writes a column saying, OK, I'm sorry, because he called Li Peng, you know, was the premier then and called him all sorts of bad things. He called him son of a turtle egg, which basically means a bastard. You don't know who your father is. And, you know, some other even kind of ruder things that he did, disgrace, national humiliation, et cetera, et cetera.

So in September, the Chinese like put the screws on his on his on his business, on the Giordano business. And remember, this is just when China's opening up. I mean, really, they had just in the last year or two started opening up to foreign retailers and companies like Giordano. This was the future. I mean, he could have made billions.

So, of course, the Chinese thought because, you know, 999 out of 1000 businessmen at least are going to back down when they're threatened with a loss of their business. I mean, I've known a lot of these people. I don't blame them. That's their that's who they are. They're business people and they want to run a successful business. And it's about profits, but it's also just about the business.

And Jimmy's like, no, you know, actually, I think he's such a serial entrepreneur. He's such a restless guy. I think, frankly, he was getting a little bored, probably of the clothing, you know, and the textile and the retail business. And he found media really exciting. But so, you know, Chinese try to put the screws on. So he writes the column in July. They start shutting the companies in August.

And then in September, he writes a piece just saying, look, I'm really sorry if my language is a little rude, but I mean it and I mean it more. And here's why I think the communists are bad news and Li Peng is bad news. And we've got to consign them to the dust heap of history. I mean, he's just a guy, you know, will go toe to toe with anybody. And if for what he believes is right. And first of all, you know, he has such a strong sense of what's right and what's just and what freedom is, because he's

You know, he grew up having seen a glimmer of it as a very very young boy seen it destroyed seen his life almost destroyed Seen his family ripped apart and almost destroyed. He knew what he was up against. This wasn't some theoretical academic exercise and um, yeah, so um

You know, again, I don't know what else to say, except there is one in a billion, one in one point four billion. Maybe there's nobody like him in the world. I mean, you think of other dissidents. And as you say, doesn't take anything away. I mean, a barefoot lawyer, people of powerlessness. Actually, I in some way, I also deserve at least as much credit for for what they go through. But people who have money usually are very reluctant to risk everything because they don't want to lose what they have, the money, the power, the business, everything.

And, you know, I just I just can't underscore enough the uniqueness of the sacrifices that he's made and continues to make. And by the way, his family, he's got six kids. You know, he has a loving wife, an ex-wife who I think feels very strongly, you know, positively towards him. And, you know, they suffer a lot, too, because they didn't choose this. So what can the international community do to help?

Help Jimmy Lai, help Hong Kong.

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, obviously we can't have any direct influence on Hong Kong politics or Chinese politics. So we have to work indirectly at the committee for freedom in Hong Kong foundation. We focused our efforts on Washington and on London on especially elected politicians, but also on, on government officials. Um, we need them to, uh, real and, and, you know, I mentioned the business community before, but I mean, we've really focused on, on, um,

the political community. We really need pressure put on China. We need to raise the cost for China for what it's doing to Jimmy and what it's doing to, you know, really to all of Hong Kong, but especially other political prisoners. We need to make it so difficult for them, so painful for them that they realize it's easier and, you know, there's less cost to letting them free. I've been very encouraged that during the campaign, President-elect Trump said he would 100% get Jimmy Lai out

He said, you know, we don't have anybody talking about that now. I don't know if that's true or not. He said it would be easy. You know, President-elect Trump is a very transactional oriented guy. I would hope that Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, realizes that actually it's almost no cost to letting Jimmy out. Apple Daily is not it's

you know, we're not, he's not going to get out of prison and, you know, start running the presses at Apple daily again. It's not going to happen. He wants to leave. I think enjoy his, you know, he's 76 years old, wants to enjoy his life. Um, uh, and, um, I don't think he'd be a threat to the Chinese communist party. So I think,

I think the CCP needs to decide for its own interest that it's better to let Jimmy out than to keep him in jail. And I think, I hope that once they let Jimmy out, they can see the wisdom of letting others out of the Hong Kong prison. So the only thing we can do is we have moral power. You know, we don't have an army or anything in the U S is not going to invade China to get

Jimmy Lai and the Hong Kong political prisoners out. So we've got to use political means, moral pressure to the extent we can use economic pressure. I don't expect Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, Goldman Sachs or anybody else to go campaign on Jimmy Lai's behalf. I would hope that quietly the business community are

friends in the business community who are very friendly to the Chinese can start making the point to the Chinese leadership that this is causing everybody way more trouble than it's worth. Until they let Jimmy out, the pressure is just going to keep increasing. So I'm at the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. We're the CFHK.org. So T-H-E-C-F-H-K.org. And we've got a newsletter. The more the merrier when it comes to public support.

I mentioned President Trump, but I think that one really encouraging thing about, you know, Hong Kong in general, but Hong Kong particularly, Jimmy, Hong Kong, China, it's a real bipartisan issue in the U.S. and I think in the West. I think there's people understand people on both sides of the aisle in Washington understand the importance of Jimmy, the importance of Hong Kong as a, you know, still a beacon of freedom, although, you know,

a bit under a bushel right now. Um, and, uh, that, that there's widespread support, you know, this is just such a great, easy, obvious issue. And, um, let's, let's try to solve it together. And we've, we have really appreciated the support, um,

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi the other day was at a press conference, you know, in support of the Hong Kong 45. There's just been great, great support on Capitol Hill and looking for we've had good support from the current administration, looking forward to more support from the incoming administration. So that's where our power and that's where our force comes from. Do you have anything specific that you would like our viewers to do?

Well, I think, you know, to the extent that you are politically engaged or engaged with with your with your congressmember, it would be great to to.

underscore the importance of Hong Kong. A previous book I wrote was called Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World. And I do fear that if we don't keep freedom alive to the extent we can, even though it's under threat in Hong Kong, that it's going to be that much easier for China to feel emboldened to go into Taiwan or go into other places. I'd like to say, write letters to Jimmy Lai, but they've been cutting off his mail, it seems like. So we can't even give him that comfort. But

You know, remember who he is. If you're a person of faith, please pray for him. If you're a political person, please, you know, work with your representatives and others. And, you know, just keep out for keep an eye out for the kind of nefarious, I don't know, panda hugging tactics. I think of the Chinese Communist Party in the Hong Kong government to make it seem like everything's normal in Hong Kong because it's not.

We've never seen the kind of rapid destruction of freedom that we've seen in Hong Kong, as I said, outside of a war or a revolution. And it doesn't have to last forever. So we're going to keep the light burning.

Thank you. No more hugging pandas. I'm guessing Jimmy Lai's bear was not a panda bear. No, it was what's called a moon bear. I'm told by his daughter that it really liked cream soda. It once tried to escape and Jimmy wrestled with it and got a bit scratched up. But it was not a panda. I think he had pretty much everything else in that zoo back there. I'm almost getting RFK Jr. vibes from that.

We got to save Jimmy Lai and do it for the bear. Exactly. Well, really thank you for all your interest and all the work you do on behalf of China and Hong Kong and freedom. So thanks for your interest. Absolutely. And we'll leave a link to your foundation below for the audience to click on and check out. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Hope to see you again sometime. Definitely.

Yeah, one of the things that's after me is just like all the petty ways the CCP tries to go after people You know, they use their families or or in this case, you know, it's shocking that they're denying Jimmy Jimmy lie the Eucharist Which is like so core to to to his faith. I don't think that's petty I think that's actually like the CCP trying to break it but but they don't understand religion because they're an evil cult themselves

By persecuting him in such a way, yeah, he might not be able to eat the Eucharist, but he is now closer to Christ through this persecution. He gets to taste a little bit of what Christ endured. I think that's kind of when Mark was talking about if he's painting Christ on the cross. Obviously, this is something he's thinking about, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's not what they think it is because they don't understand people. They don't understand human nature.

It's like they the CCP targets the things they fear most right they fear rich people Where they want to kill them and take their stuff they fear people who have a voice and he has a huge voice with the Apple Daily And they fear religion because religion puts people's faith outside the Communist Party. So so Jimmy Lai is the trifecta of those things that the CCP fears most but then the irony is by going after him like if the CCP had just

You know, they shut down the Apple Daily and they just kind of didn't make a public spectacle of him anymore. Like he wouldn't have been this. Well, I mean, as soon as you shut down Apple Daily, Jimmy Lai is going to say something. That's probably too. I mean, it's actually very hard to squash him. Yeah. I mean, like what you're saying is like the CCP would have to not be an evil cult. If only they were not an evil cult and ran China well and didn't persecute people.

Then Jimmy Lai wouldn't end up being a critic of it. Yeah, I think they don't really understand. Like, I have nothing against Jack Ma, but look at what happened with Jack Ma. He got, you know, he got persecuted. He got disappeared for three months. He came back and he didn't say anything so much to support the CCP, but he stopped criticizing. And then he just left the country and leads a relatively quiet life in Japan.

And I think they probably expected that they could do that to anybody. And Jimmy Lai is this weird exception. They just... Well, also, I mean, I think...

He hasn't been conditioned by living under the communist system for his entire life, right? Like yeah, he did for the first 12 years of his life but then he lived in Hong Kong and from what Mark was talking about how he was like really interested in you know Learning all these things and really treasured, you know freedom Well, that's the difference he escaped. Yeah, and then like Western values all these things that he felt like were great about Hong Kong and

So, yeah, I think that's the difference when the CCP comes in because they've been used to squashing their own people for so long that like Hong Kong was tough for them for a while because people weren't knuckling under the way they thought they would. Like, you know, in a way it took them...

probably about 20 years longer than they thought it was going to because even though they promised 50 years of no change under one country two systems like Mark mentioned they tried in 2003 to Implement the national security law under article 23. Yeah, they probably thought that's when yeah So they probably thought that that was you know going to do it and then people still kind of held them off for another 20 years Yeah and that's something that I

they probably were pretty pissed about because, you know, it's, they didn't like that Hong Kong didn't kind of go quietly like Macau did or something like that. Yeah. And I think it's really, it's kind of touching to hear what Jimmy had to say about like,

Western values because I think right now we're in a period where a lot of people in the West are critical of Western values or things have been refrained that Oh Western values is just about colonialism which is a narrative the CCP loves to use in Hong Kong and that there really is a lot that we should treasure

Yeah, the sort of freedom and rule of law. And one of the things that, you know, when the CCP and the Hong Kong government were going after him, without evidence, they shut down his bank account, right? Without evidence, they jailed him and held him. And when you, you can actually see these things

start to creep in in some Western countries. Canadian trucker protests? Right, and that's a great example of where the truckers hadn't been convicted of any crimes, but those individuals, the Canadian government told banks, including TD Bank, the Canadian bank, to lock the bank accounts of those protesters, right? And even people who contributed. Yeah, they had GoFundMe

basically withhold the contributions that individuals including in america had made to support these protesters and it was a i mean totally illegal right but they did it through this mechanism of law and and you know whatever you know when you have security security right security is a a really tricky thing because oh everyone wants security but also you can see how easily

that can be manipulated. You know a good way for people to have security? Let them all have guns. Or bears. Or bears. Don't let the bears have guns, because then it'll be Planet of the Bears. I actually didn't know that...

I don't know. They don't have opposable... We have a right to bear arms. They don't have opposable thumbs, so there may not be such a Planet of the Apes-style uprising. But I did not know that Jimmy Lai had this crazy menagerie. And a moon bear. I don't know what a moon bear is. It's a small bear. It's not like grizzly bear size. Cleefairy was from the moon. Not a grizzly bear.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to have... You want a small bear, right? Right. You want a small bear. That makes more sense how we could wrestle with it. Yes. And, you know, drink a little cream soda. It's so cute. I feel like PETA would not be happy with that. Yeah. Well, anyway...

i was going to make a i was going to say something about the security state point that you made but now i've completely forgotten it because we started talking about bear arms well i mean okay so so hong kong like all this that's happening under hong kong like the national security law so they're framing everything under security um and but i want to make a another point about western governments infringing uh on the sort of this issue of security or for safety

And I've been reading about how in the UK, people have been arrested for praying outside abortion clinics. Silently. Silently praying in their own heads. And this has nothing to do with my views on abortion. My concern here is that

They're curtailing some people's freedom of speech in order to make other people feel safer But it's not actually keeping them safe from bodily injury. I mean, can you even say it's freedom of speech? They're not saying and they're they're thinking yeah, it's it's freedom of thought which is which is this is like super Orwell meets Kafka meets Allison Allison. I don't I don't know if we hit the Alice in Wonderland part yet, but I

Well, yeah, I mean, it's it's basically like when you start to curtail speech or thought or money right under the guise of security, but you're doing it in a way that's that's not backed by criminal charges. This is this is when things get hard.

really scary and you start to see the liberal democracies slipping and becoming authoritarian in this way and and that's what Hong Kong did in this very very quick period but it is happening in liberal democracies in a in a slow way and we see these little snippets of it and it's scary we talked about covet being a boon for the Chinese Communist Party but also I think

a lot of this slippage wouldn't have happened as fast even in the Western world if it hadn't been for

um suddenly coveted lockdowns are okay and this kind of stuff right a large number of people accepted very draconian rules uh of you know no gatherings no uh don't go to church yeah well a lot of people accepted the ban on other people going to church right and because most americans no longer go to church i don't know what the percentage is actually but like it's easy to say oh well

Yeah, I don't want my neighbors going to church because then they could get infected and blah, blah, blah. But then like this is how – I really believe that a government that stops protecting individual freedom – when you protect individuals' freedom and rights, you do actually protect overall security and stability. But if you start to go after targeting –

overall security first then that's when individual liberties and freedoms start to slip and actually they slip very very fast and Very soon it becomes more authoritarian than you believed as possible. I remember we did an episode of China Uncensored called

early on in the pandemic called the answer to like the cure for Coronavirus is not authoritarianism. Right. It wasn't even called COVID yet. That's how early on the cure for the coronavirus is an authoritarianism. Just calling out that, you know, governments should not be applauding, you know, the scenes of, you know, people being put into boxes in China or locked inside their apartments and stuff like that. And of course, you know,

One is that that didn't actually stop COVID ultimately from spreading all over China. But two, do you remember what happened to that particular YouTube episode? Did it get... It was taken down. YouTube completely censored that episode. And then we did this... Is that one of the ones that we had to go tweet at YouTube? Yeah, we literally took to Twitter. When it was still Twitter. But anyway, so... And again, it's YouTube.

thinking about, oh, well, maybe instead of protecting our individual creators, we should have this idea of overall security and silence the people that are gonna upset this overall security about the coronavirus. - Well, speaking of that slide, like there was a Rasmussen poll from January, 2022, where they surveyed Republicans and Democrats about, well, these issues and over 50% of Democrats said they wanted to find the unvaccinated

Almost 60% said lock the unvaccinated at home. Over 40% said send unvaccinated to quarantine camps. About 40% said take children away from unvaccinated parents. About 50% said fine and imprison critics of vaccines. So yeah, you can see how supposedly, you know, well-educated liberal Democrats, again, very easily find themselves sliding to authoritarianism. I think also with the...

stuff that happened looking back the the u.s was also one of the countries that was like didn't count natural immunity yeah that's one of the things so it was just unlike a lot of european countries and you know it's so sad that sweden was completely wiped out not a single one survived that country no longer exists because of their lax covid policies

f in the chat i i think it's one of the one of the funnier things that came out of coven was that suddenly um conservatives were like we should follow sweden let's look to europe yes and also conservatives were like my body my choice well i mean that's another case where uh a lot of conservatives are like basically imitating european abortion laws

Right. Look to Europe, the old world. I mean, so this really goes back to like what's happening in Hong Kong, which is that you start to see, and the CCP tried to implement these gradually, gradually, to just get like little bits of Hong Kong to slip here and slip there and slip more. But then there was a point where it just slipped completely away. And that was, I think,

uh you know june 30th 2020 when the national security law was implemented but the hong kong people didn't go down without fighting i think that's the thing that is also different because they have have you know mainland china right next door and a lot of people as mark had mentioned escaped from

the communist system right and so i think like a lot of the things that we were talking about that happened during covid in the west or whatever like i don't think people

the time especially understood what was dangerous about them like a lot of people didn't because they Never had that experience of authoritarianism So in Hong Kong when they started to try to pass the national security law half a million people marched When they started to try to implement patriotic education, right? That was the precursor to the umbrella movement where like high school students came out and were like we don't want this you know, so

There were a lot of things that they tried to slip it through, but Hong Kong people were, in general, fairly vigilant. Right. Much more so than people in Europe or the United States and Canada.

Yeah, because we haven't had that experience of being under authoritarianism that a lot of people did. But that's not to say that there weren't also people in Hong Kong who were happy to go along with what the CCP said and, you know, were, you know, when we were there for the protest, you had like the pan yellow people and the blue people, right, where the blue people were supporting the government and being like, you know, protesters are troublemakers and we need better security. They had great drum circles too, by the way.

The blue people. They had drums for it? I know what you're talking about. The group, right? Oh. Ah. Blue man group. Blue man group. Shelly. It was so obvious. Okay. Anyway, I think we've digressed enough. Well, it was important. We talked about so many important things and we really hadn't gone off the rails yet. And Chris really brought it to where we need to go. No, I think we already went off the rails once. We talked about bears. No, that was totally on topic. And...

Yeah, right to bear arms. I think right to bear arms was definitely going off the rails. Look, can we wrap this up? I really can't bear it anymore. Okay. So I think, all right, this is actually a very important message. We have launched our premium subscription website. This is a bad time to talk about this. No, no. ChinaUncensored.tv.

Subscribe, support the show. We'll use the money we make to buy a bear. And the bear will join us on the show.

Imagine how much more entertaining the show will be with a bear a little moon bear Okay, when I said they were small I didn't mean they were this small not saying like no It's I'm imagining like a monkey size or something like a monkey bear like a lap bear. Yeah, you know TV shows are always good like throw like I'm a TV exec but get get an animal on the show our ratings will go through the roof if we can afford a bear more people will watch and

Do not deny it. You know it to be true. I hate that I actually think you're right about more people watching us if we had a bear. We had a bear. But first we need the money to buy the bear. I'm sure there's also more expenses than just the upfront cost of buying a bear. We'd have to buy them cream soda. They live on that, right? We'd need to buy guns to prevent the government from seizing our bear. Yeah.

Which we'll call Berenstein the bear. So the point is you need to subscribe on ChinaInCensored.tv. Thank you for watching. I'm Chris Chappell. I'm Shelley Tong. And I'm Matt Gnaizda. Talk to you next time with the bear.