Opinion | On the question of Jimmy Lai
By Tom Fowdy
Monday marked the beginning of the national security trial of Jimmy Lai. Lai, the former news tycoon and owner of the now-defunct Apple Daily, is charged with foreign collusion and faces a penalty of up to life in prison. Naturally, the mainstream Western media have responded by framing him in the language of a "pro-democracy campaigner" and depicting the situation as an act of state persecution against the freedom of Hong Kong, as if Lai is an innocent man who has done nothing wrong. This, however, is a wilful and deliberate misinterpretation of the facts.
First of all, might we ask ourselves if would it be tolerable if an influential media mogul in Britain or America, actively collaborated with the highest level leadership of a hostile power, in order to ferment an agenda of creating political change in their country, to the bidding of that country? Would for example, we tolerate Rupert Murdoch meeting Xi Jinping or Putin, or any influential news figure? It might be added that in Western countries people are often prosecuted for collusion on far less a premise, or even on the premise of total paranoia, as we saw with the Westminster "spy" story.
The foreign collusion of Jimmy Lai is not in fact a secret, a conspiracy theory, or paranoia, but is very much in the open. As a wealthy and influential dissident figure in Hong Kong, Lai actively and publicly engaged with the highest levels of the Trump administration and became a conduit for US foreign policy goals in the city, which was encouraged by most senior US politicians as a means of getting at China. Lai met with National Security Advisor John Bolton, as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. His goal, as per that of other high-profile Hong Kong activists at that time, was to encourage US intervention in the Hong Kong issue which logically represented a direct threat to China's sovereign interests.
We might ask ourselves again, would the US tolerate any independence activists from Puerto Rico, Hawaii or other territories, meeting foreign leaders to further their agenda with the goal of undermining American rule? We do not need to answer this question or the penalties they would face on doing so. In which case, why is this acceptable in Hong Kong just because it is under the banner of "freedom and democracy"? But not only is there the collusion element, but Lai was in addition, a ringleader in one of the biggest periods of unrest, disorder and violence the city has ever seen. It is again, without question that no other state on earth would tolerate riots on such a scale with the view to sustaining a total insurrection against the state.
Again, we are posed to visit other examples. The United Kingdom has increasingly hardened its laws on the prosecution and jailing of violent activists. For example, a large number of "Stop Oil!" and other climate activists have been imprisoned for paralyzing public infrastructure or other forms of disorder and vandalism, some of them even for years. In other Western countries, in particular such as America, the police have no qualms about even using violent force to suppress disruptive protests, at a far larger scale than what was seen in Hong Kong. We might add further that the punishments for those who led the insurrection in the US capital in 2021, the punishments were also very harsh indeed. Why should this be acceptable in Hong Kong, if not at home?
Given this, there is nothing unacceptable about Hong Kong's national security law and its application to suppress foreign-backed insurrection which reduced the city to a state of chaos in 2019. Western countries are attempting to deprive China of its own sovereign rights, in its own lawful territory, as a pretext to advancing their own ideological and sovereign goals. The Basic Law of Hong Kong has long mandated the inclusion of national security law, and more to the point the designated autonomy of Hong Kong has never been extended to matters of high sovereignty, foreign policy, national security or defense.
However, we should nonetheless continue to expect Western governments to intervene in the process of the rule of law pertaining to Jimmy Lai, and perhaps even apply sanctions when they inevitably disprove of the outcome. The city is a better place after this insurrection was brought to an end, and we should not pretend that 150 years of British rule made the city a beacon of freedom or democracy, where people were free to pursue large-scale destruction and violence in the pursuit of political goals. The 1960s tells us a very different story.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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