Lai, the flamboyant businessman and founder of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, arrived in Hong Kong at age twelve as a stowaway on

A Crime Scene in Hong Kong

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2021-06-18 02:00:04

Lai, the flamboyant businessman and founder of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, arrived in Hong Kong at age twelve as a stowaway on a boat from the Chinese mainland. The runaway began his business career as a child laborer in a garment factory and ended it a billionaire — Hong Kong, when it was the world’s freest city, was the sort of place where that could happen.

Lai used his fortune, his celebrity, and his newspaper to support the cause of liberty and democracy in Hong Kong, and was so disinclined to submit to Beijing’s rule that he became a British national in 1996 as the island reverted to Communist Party control. He is at the moment a 72-year-old political prisoner in one of Xi Jinping’s gulags. But as Henry David Thoreau argued, prison is the only fitting place for an honest man living under a criminal government, and Lai has described his incarceration as the “pinnacle” of his career.

Lai, a Catholic, takes a long view of his situation. It would be interesting to know what he makes of the Holy See’s remarkably accommodating policy regarding Beijing — there was a time, not long ago, when a pope knew what to do with a Communist police state.