MORNING GLORY: Why the world should care about Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai
On Thursday, May 29, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation awarded an Honorary Bradley Prize to Jimmy Lai, a political prisoner of China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
Lai was a serial entrepreneur who began with nothing and founded and grew major businesses in China before his imprisonment, where his Hong Kong-based media organizations, including Apple News, prospered and where he had become a symbol of free speech in the embattled city.
Lai is also the most prominent persecuted Catholic in the world and should be all that Pope Leo XIV needs to know about Xi and his sinister plans for the church in China. (Leo should exit the ill-advised agreement his predecessor entered into with the Chinese communists, an agreement that is as sacrilegious as it is dangerous to the worldwide church.)
Lai believed deeply in the rights of Hong Kong residents guaranteed them when the United Kingdom returned Hong Kong to China in 1997. At that time the United Kingdom and the People’s Republic of China entered into an agreement, known as the Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which the PRC committed to the United Kingdom that Hong Kong citizens would retain their high degree of autonomy and the preservation of their capitalist system and way of life for 50 years.
This included the right to a separate executive, legislative and independent judicial system apart from that of Beijing’s, as well as freedoms of assembly, speech and the press. The world can judge Xi’s credibility by his actions vis-à-vis Jimmy Lai.
The Bradley Foundation awards its prizes to individuals whose work exemplifies the foundation's mission to promote American exceptionalism and the Western tradition. It recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to scholarship, cultural institutions or public policy, often with a focus on conservative or classical liberal themes. The foundation’s decision to highlight the plight of Jimmy Lai was an honorable and important step in bringing attention to his captivity in solitary confinement and under harsh conditions.
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Xi now faces a dilemma. He rightly must conclude that Lai’s case is soaring in the attention it receives around the world and that harsh judgments of Xi by the world’s leaders and its businesses follow attention to the case.
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Xi ought also to fear what the martyrdom of Lai would mean in the longer term for China. Who wants to invest in, much less visit, a country so cruel as to imprison a 77-year-old and increasingly frail man of faith?
Did Xi learn nothing from the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was preceded by the world’s attention on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and Vladimir Bukovsky? High-profile dissidents are largely forgotten once they are exiled from their countries. The United Kingdom would accept Lai if Xi expelled him, but Xi’s reputation for ruthlessness only increases and thus the world’s wariness only climbs the longer Lai remains imprisoned.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have already linked their legacies to the freeing of Lai, and Pope Leo’s is now inextricably connected to the heroic witness for the faith that Lai is living. We can pray the Bradley Foundation has provided the spark the world needed to focus on Lai.
"As you can see, I am not Jimmy Lai," Jimmy Lai’s son Sebastian said on accepting the Bradley Prize in his father’s place on May 29. "Instead of being here with you wonderful people, accepting this prestigious award, my father sits in a maximum-security jail in Hong Kong as a high-risk category a prisoner. He’s in jail in Hong Kong for the same reason he is being celebrated here, for courage in the face of oppression."
We should hope everyone in the world doing business with China realizes they are complicit in the harsh imprisonment of Jimmy Lai. They have the ability to appeal to Xi to #FreeJimmyLai as the hashtag puts it. Will they use it?
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/tv show today.