Latest / Liberty + Leadership / The Cost of Courage: Mark L. Clifford on the Life of Jimmy Lai

Transcript

The Cost of Courage: Mark L. Clifford on the Life of Jimmy Lai · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Today I'm your host, roger Ream.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: I'm excited to welcome Mark L Clifford to the show.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Mark is the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Today we'll be discussing his new book the Troublemaker how Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, hong Kong's Greatest Dissident and China's Most Feared Critic, which was released in December of 2024.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Mark is a Walter Bagot Fellow at Columbia University, holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong and lived in Asia from 1987 until 2021.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Prior to that, he was executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council, the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post publisher and editor-in-chief of the Standard, and held editorial positions at Businessweek and the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and Seoul, south Korea.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: He's won numerous academic book and journalism awards, mark.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the show, roger.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Great to be here.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: Thanks for your interest.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: This is going to be a difficult conversation for me, in part because you've written such an exceptional book.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: At times it's powerfully inspirational, at other times it's even sad.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: And the story you tell in there and while I have never had the opportunity to meet Jimmy Lai, from 2002 until 2019, my organization ran a program at the University of Hong Kong, at HKU, for young people from throughout Asia, and I do know that at least Jimmy Lai or his company did provide a junk for our students to take a beautiful trip in the harbor there each summer.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: But the story is an interesting tale and you tell it just exceptionally.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: So let me start by asking you to give listeners a brief description of who Jimmy Lai is and why you chose to write this biography of him.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Well thanks.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Jimmy is a 77-year-old man who's now sitting in solitary confinement, where he's been for most of the past four years in a Hong Kong prison on completely trumped-up charges, while a lengthy, very lengthy, one-year-plus national security law trial is underway.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: That tries to portray this wonderful man as some sort of enemy of the state who should be locked up for 10 years, if not for life.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: He started out.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: He was born in southern China, just across the border from Hong Kong, came into Hong Kong, smuggled himself in on a fishing boat at the age of 12.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: First night he was there, he slept in a factory.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: He worked in a factory.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: 15 years later he owned a factory Classic Hong Kong success story.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: But he wasn't just one of another 10,000 really successful entrepreneurs.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: He really was something more.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: And within five years or so of starting a manufacturing operation he had the biggest sweater maker in Hong Kong.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: He parlayed that success into an extraordinarily successful retail clothing chain.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: He was about to go into fast food when the Tiananmen Square killings of 1989 saw the Chinese government murder hundreds, maybe even thousands of its own people, many of its best and brightest students.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: So Jimmy decided to go into media.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the same kind of energy and extraordinary verve and creativity that he brought to making sweaters and selling shirts.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: He started first a newspaper, then a magazine, first in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan, and his publications, especially in Hong Kong, became almost like an opposition political party magazine Next were successful in rallying, helping spur millions of Hong Kongers to come out in the streets in a series of demonstrations culminating in the summer of 2019.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: And I think, ultimately the Chinese Communist Party decided Jimmy Lai was too hot to handle and the only way they knew how to deal with him was to lock him up.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: You were living in Hong Kong.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: You met Jimmy at some point and eventually joined the board of his communications company.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: Could you mention that background?
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: I moved to Hong Kong in 1992, five years before the Chinese were scheduled to take this thriving free city over after 156 years of British colonial rule.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: I met Jimmy pretty early on.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: He invited me to his house.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: He cooked lunch for me.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: I mean, he did the cooking, which was pretty impressive for a CEO, but he's really into food.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: It was a simple lunch a stir fry with veggies and rice.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: And, yeah, I knew him over the years.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: I met him hundreds of times and then I went on his board in 2018, a couple of years before the newspaper and magazine was forcibly shut by the government when it froze our bank accounts without a court order.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: So I don't want to say I was present at the creation, but I was at least kind of watching from the sidelines and then, ultimately, as a board member, much, much more involved in the publications.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: I've heard you say that Jimmy Lai was forged in fire when you describe his upbringing and his early years.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, not only his life in China as a child and the experiences there, but when he first came to Hong Kong and how he got there.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: That's a great question, I mean because you can't understand Jimmy without understanding how he was forged, how he was made.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: So he was born two years before Mao took power in China and what had been a prosperous family his father, had married into a shipping family it was just ripped apart by the revolution and the family lost most of what they had.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: The house was split up.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: The father went to Hong Kong.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: Jimmy and his twin sister and another sister was a couple years older were pretty much left to fend for themselves.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: The mother was in and out of what he's described as labor camps.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: They seemed to have been more like you'd work during the week and you'd be home on weekend than a typical Chinese labor camp.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: But they were rough.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: There wasn't a lot of food.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: There were these kids.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: They were four years old, six years old, when their mother first was taken off for this kind of re-education and they were fending for themselves.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: Jimmy was hustling black market.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: He'd ground tobacco off the streets and re-roll it and sell a cigarette.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: He'd steal scrap metal and sell it.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: He'd be, you know, just feel thrilled if he found a field mouse that he could grill.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: That was like as a delicacy.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: I mean, this was a time of real hunger in China, especially right before he left.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: So something like we don't really know the number something like 45 million people died in the famine.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: The famine accompanied the so-called Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and Jimmy left during this period.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: So he was this skinny 12-year-old who I think his mother was probably afraid he'd perish of hunger if he stayed in China.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: So he got a one-way permit to Macau.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: He smuggled himself onto a sampan, a little fishing boat, and made the journey east across the Pearl River Delta to Hong Kong, Was smuggled in, you know, in a remote area of the city, Managed to find his aunt and uncle.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: Their place was so small he couldn't even sleep on the floor and that's why he ended up in the factory the first night.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: He was a hustler.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: I mean, he's an incredibly smart guy, as is his twin sister, although they're wired quite differently.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: He's a hard worker, he's smart, he wanted to please and he found a succession of older men, of mentors, who helped him learn the trade, learn English, spent a lot of time reading the dictionary while he was living in the factory.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: I mean, these were really, really tough times.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: I mean people were living on the streets in Hong Kong.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: There were more than a million refugees that had preceded him in the 10 or 12 years after the Chinese Revolution.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: They were just flooding into Hong Kong to escape the poverty and the political persecution of China.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: That was the world in which he, as a young boy, young man, grew up in and he came to Hong Kong and it was freedom.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: The first morning he described smelling the rice, the congee, the rice porridge that so many Hong Kongers eat for breakfast, and the dim sum, the flour-based dumplings and other food.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: And you know, wow, this was freedom for him.
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: It was a freedom to eat, freedom to work, the freedom to start his own business.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Eventually, more rarefied freedoms, political freedom and spiritual freedom.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: He converted to Catholicism in 1997.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, quite a survivor when you consider there must have been in those shanty towns, the diseases, the TB, the fires, a lot of hardships.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: He had to be a hustler and entrepreneurial to survive all that.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: He worked his way quickly as a kind of a rags to riches success story, first in manufacturing, then in fashion and apparel and eventually to the media.
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: But why don't you talk a little bit about how he became such a success and it led him to end up traveling to the United States and elsewhere in the world?
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Great question.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: He's always such a curious guy and again, I've known him for more than 30 years and sometimes you kind of wonder, like what's really making this guy tick, and thought about that a lot.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: I mean, first of all, this insatiable curiosity, this really really brilliant mind, and in some funny areas he happens to have a great sense of color, and that, of course, helped him in fashion.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: He studied with a famous Chinese-American artist who passed away in the last couple of decades, wallace Ting, and so Jimmy's in prison now and he's drawing so a religious theme.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: He never even finished primary school.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: He repeated at least one, maybe more grades in primary school.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: But he has this native intelligence brilliance, I would say, coupled with an insatiable desire to learn.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: And you know, maybe that's typical of some people who actually don't get enough formal schooling and they always kind of worry that they've missed out.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: I mean, I know, at the age of 19, he was already in Japan acting as a salesperson.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: I don't think he speaks Japanese to this day, although he has a house in Kyoto, but he, I guess, had enough English by that point that his company felt comfortable sending him abroad.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: As a teenager he spent a lot of time in New York and that's where I think he really got an appreciation for freedom and for just kind of wide open anything goes kind of place.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: And it's there that he was kind of adopted by a New York family and used to spend many weeks, if not months, much more challenging books than he'd read before.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: And one night they took him over to dinner at another friend's house and Jimmy was complaining about the Chinese communists, as he was wont to do, and that's probably what's got him in jail.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: At the end of the dinner the host reached over to his bookshelf, pulled down a book and it was Hayek's Road to Serfdom and he said read this, you know, study it, learn something.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: In other words, you're just kind of blathering about how horrible the Chinese are, but this will give you a little bit more of a theoretical, a structured approach to it.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: And from there he just started just almost inhaling books.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: But Hayek was very, very important to him.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: Karl Popper, these were men who really believed in freedom, free markets and free people, and I think this gave Jimmy a lot more of the intellectual base to supplement his kind of native feeling for freedom.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I recall in the Acton Institute film Call of the Entrepreneur, when Jimmy tells the story of being given this book Road to Serfdom by Hayek, he's choked up and in tears telling that story and how much that meant to him and you quote I think it's Bill McGurn in your book talking about when he got to Hong Kong that Jimmy had read everything by Hayek.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: So he was a devourer, I know, of books.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: I'd love to ask you a little more, since it's an important part of your book was Jimmy's decision to become a Catholic, which he did on what?
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: The same day as the handover of Hong Kong?
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: I think he decided the day after the handover.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: He did about a week later, which is pretty fast.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: He met his second wife, teresa, in 1989, just a month after the Tiananmen killings, the June 4th killings.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: I think he was at a.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: Maybe it was a little bit adrift, I mean, one of the problems.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: Actually.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: I got to be honest about writing this biography.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: I've known him a long time, I've talked to him about a lot of things, but he's in jail, I can't communicate with him.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: He's being tried for collusion with foreigners and I don't need to cause him any more trouble.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: So there's some of this is kind of supposition, but I think he I've talked to Bill about this his godfather, his wife, had left him a couple years earlier.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: He had three kind of fairly young kids, teenagers, and he met Teresa Lee, who was a summer reporter, an intern at the South China Morning Post, and was smitten by her.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: So you know he'd been on his own for two or three years and pursued Teresa.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: She was studying in Paris.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: He went and spent a lot of time in Paris, wooed her.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: They married a couple of years later and through her especially, he started talking to spiritual advisors, mostly from the Catholic church, about.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: He, jimmy, is a real seeker.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: He's always questing, he's always looking for kind of the next thing and again, at first it was just like food and being able to work.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: And then I think he moved on to really a higher plane and I think Teresa would have liked a very devout Catholic, would have liked him to convert earlier.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: But her feeling was and I think many of us who knew him was that he was already kind of most of the way there.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: He just hadn't gone through the formal rituals.
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: And I say this, I'm not a Catholic, but I mean just it was definitely a part of his life, an important part.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: After the handover it would generally take a year or so of study before one can convert, unless the circumstances are extreme.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: I guess Chimmy made a pretty good case that the circumstances were extreme, as Teresa told me.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: You know he saw trouble coming after the Chinese took over Hong Kong and he figured that it would probably be better to have a higher power on his side.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: It's not clear immediately how much of a difference it made in his life.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: On the one hand, he was already kind of most of the way there, as his friends would say.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: On the other hand, what's happened in the last four years while he's been in prison is that his faith has really deepened and sustained him in a very powerful way.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: He gets four or so books a month.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: They're all Catholic theology he's able to draw.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: As I said, he draws exclusively religious themes.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: It's a really important part of his life and I think if one is going to be as strong and as free as Jimmy by all accounts seems to be in prison, it's helpful I don't mean this like sardonically at all Helpful to have a really powerful supportive spouse, partner and some sort of faith.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: And I was the moderator for a live stream conversation where Jimmy and Nate and Sharansky talked about this, and many of your viewers will know that Sharansky spent nine years in the Soviet gulag in really horrific conditions and I've talked to Sharansky about this subsequently.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: He was really struck by Jimmy.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: They had, I believe, three conversations this public one and two private ones and Sharansky said he'd never met anybody like Jimmy, the guy who knew he was going in jail.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: He could have run away, he was a very wealthy man with houses around the globe and he decided to stay.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: And his faith and his wife and his belief that what he was doing was right is what has really anchored him, and it's interesting Sharansky was kind enough to write the foreword to the book as well, and I think his remarks are really spot on.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a powerful foreword you've included there by Sharansky, because of the similarity of the circumstances and the fact that they had those conversations leading up to Jimmy's time in prison.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Those who have said the kind of conditions that he's being kept in now, in a cell with no air conditioning, and for those who don't know, hong Kong gets very hot and humid.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: He gets maybe 50 minutes a day, you said, to get some exercise, go outside, but he's allowed only a handful of books a month.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: He's not allowed communion.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Solitary confinement.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: Many people have considered that a form of torture and violation of international standards.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: How much communication is there with him?
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: His wife get to visit and what do you think about those conditions?
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, they're tough, as you say.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: Actually, the United Nations, under the Mandela principles, says that solitary confinement should only be used as a last resort, you know, if the prisoner is a danger to himself or to other people, and it shouldn't be for more than 15 days, and Jimmy's been in prison nonstop since December 31st 2020.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: So we're coming up on 1,500 days of incarceration, most of that in solitary confinement, and, yeah, under UN conventions it's regarded as a kind of torture.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: He has no natural light.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: Authorities have said that there's indirect light in the corridor outside his cell, no windows at all.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: They seem obsessed with trying to prevent any sort of images of him coming out.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: As you say, he goes out for about 50 minutes a day.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: I guess he's out of the cell for an hour, so he's exercising for 50 minutes a day.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: An Associated Press photographer in the summer of 2023, surreptitiously took a long lens photograph and the authorities of Jimmy going out to exercise.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: He looked fine.
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: I mean, definitely looked thinner, gaunt.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there wasn't a sign of horrible treatment or anything.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: Again, we don't know what he's like mentally from a picture like that.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: But for her pains, the authorities threw this woman photographer out of Hong Kong, denied her a visa.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: I mean they just seem again obsessed with Jimmy, which is to me so misplaced, because there were millions of Hong Kong people out in the streets voting for democracy.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Every time there's an election, six out of 10 Hong Kongers more or less go for the pro-democracy camp.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: I mean it always wins a majority.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: And so to put all this pressure on Jimmy and, as you say, the conditions, I think there are people around him who are concerned that he might not make it through another summer.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: He's sleeping on some kind of straw substance, as you say, no air conditioning.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: It's very, very hot and so he's got a lot of heat rash issues in the summer.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: It's obviously cold in the winter.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: When he's not on trial, where he's kept closer to the court, he's in Stanley Prison.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: It's a maximum security prison built before World War II, 1937, by the British authorities.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: The conditions are, they're lousy and he's in prison and has had, you know, kind of marginally successful cataract operation while in prison Doesn't seem to be seen too well Lost a lot of his hearing and part of his finger fingertip, working in those factories back when he was a kid.
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: So it's tough conditions, right.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: You know from what Sieranski described in his experience in the Gulag.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it can be worse, but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that this is a man who shouldn't be in jail, who's put under a lot of pressure.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: Jimmy never likes to complain.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: I discourage people from saying he's quote unquote rotting in jail.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: He's not.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: He's probably as free as he's ever been in his mind.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: But of course he'd like to be free and he'd like to leave Hong Kong to spend his last years with his family.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: We just hope we can get him out quickly enough that he does that.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know we've seen the Chinese held Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: They held him in prison until he was just about to die.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: Then they put him in a prison hospital and he died, right, I mean that's not the fate that anybody deserves.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: You know you touch on this theme that comes out of Sharansky and Jimmy Lai in your book that Jimmy's as free as he's ever been and it's remarkable that someone in prison, in confinement, like he is under those conditions, has a different kind of spiritual and he stayed really because he wanted to support the students who were fighting for democracy and stand on the principles he believed in.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: We honored Jimmy at our 29th Annual Journalism Awards Dinner in New York a few years ago.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: Obviously he couldn't be there but we gave him our Kenneth Tomlinson Award for Courage in Journalism.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Bill McGurn and Paul Chigot accepted on his behalf.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: We shared a clip at that program from the Hong Konger, a film that Acton did about Jimmy.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: What do you think the real message is for others, especially for young journalists, in the life of Jimmy Lai?
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: Never give up and do what's right.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: Be creative, be innovative.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: Don't take no for an answer, but if you're going to stay, be really clear about why you're staying and what you're willing to suffer.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: We discussed seems quite free, but honestly, I mean, we'd all like to think we're heroes, but I don't think most of us are really cut out to do what he's doing and to remain free and convinced and defiant the whole time he's testifying.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: Now I think he testified 25 days on his own behalf and is now being cross-examined.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: The prosecution expects another 25 days or something and he seems unbowed.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: And that's really different for most of the not all, but many of the political prisoners in Hong Kong have pled guilty in hopes of more lenient treatment and I think if you're going to do something like this, you've really got to be certain.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure that helps young journalists except, you know, as an inspiration and a demonstration of the importance of journalism in speaking truth to power.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: I assume the verdict in this trial is preordained, but what can people do to support Jimmy Lai?
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: I know one thing, and that's to buy your book.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, if we could get this on the bestseller list, that would be sending a great message.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: I know former Vice President Mike Pence was just in Hong Kong and he spoke out for Jimmy's release from prison at a conference there.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Are there other things?
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Is it putting pressure on the new administration here in Washington?
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: Is there anything we can do?
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: Well, I think that's probably the best approach.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: The president said on the campaign trail that he would absolutely, 100% guaranteed, get Jimmy Lai out of Chinese prison.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: He said it'd be very easy.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: Look very happy to hear him say that.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: Now we need to be working with him and others in the administration to see that this is, you know, moves up the priority list and that it's actually accomplished.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: I thought Vice President Pence's remarks were terrific in Hong Kong, wasn't anything too pushy or anything, but he just pointed out that if China wants to improve relations with the US, at least in the short term, there's almost nothing they could do that would have a lower cost and a higher potential reward than moving to let Jimmy and other political prisoners out.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: I mean, china's made its point.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: Jimmy Lai is not going back.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: The presses are not going to start rolling again at Apple Daily.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: They've crushed the democracy movement in Hong Kong.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: It's not to say that most Hong Kongers don't still support democracy, but the days when you had a million or two million people out in the streets, you know, just aren't there.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: So let's work with the US administration.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: He's a British citizen, which we haven't discussed, but he's a full British citizen.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: Has been since 1992.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: Let's see our two governments put some pressure on the Chinese and make them realize that honestly he's more trouble in prison than out.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: He continues to attract international attention and support.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: That reflects very badly on Hong Kong, which is trying to reestablish itself as a trusted international business center despite this crackdown that's seen more than 1,900 political prisoners convicted in jail in the last five years.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: And if Hong Kong wants to kind of turn the page and move forward with the international community, you know the Chinese need to take some steps too, but obviously you or I can't have a lot of influence on Chinese policymaking, so it's got to come through our governments.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: I want to read two sentences from the middle of your book.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: The first is you quoting Bill McGurn and the second is yours, where you say he is driving them crazy because he won't go along with the lie.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: And then you write one man in a country of 1.4 billion who uses his considerable moral and material resources to fight the lie.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: I really like that sentence because it illustrates the point of how one man can make such a difference, while at the same time, as you just reminded me, there are I don't know if it's over a thousand other political prisoners in Hong Kong who are part of this.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: So that's powerful.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: Could you tell me a little bit about your work with the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong?
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: As we discussed earlier, I've known Jimmy for three decades and I was on the board and I felt that I needed to do something.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: After he was put in prison Initially, in the beginning of December 2020, they let him out for a few days over Christmas, and so a group of friends and I some of whom knew Jimmy not everybody who did just wanted to do what we could to try to protect freedom in Hong Kong.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure many of your viewers and your listeners have been to Hong Kong and it's a remarkable place.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: It's extraordinary, and it's extraordinary not only because of its beautiful harbor and its dynamic business environment, but also because of freedom-loving people like Jimmy and many of the 4,000 or so people we had on staff.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: And, as you said, I think right now there are about a thousand political prisoners in prison, but 1,900 have done some jail time in the last couple of years, and we wanted to do what we could just to bear witness at a time when Xi Jinping seemed to be determined to crush dissent everywhere and you know it was a broader issue.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think many of us are concerned that what happens, what China does in Hong Kong today, is a kind of playbook for some of the tactics that it wants to use in other countries to squelch freedom.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: Obviously, it has its eyes set on Taiwan, but we're all or many of us longtime Hong Kong residents and just felt the need to do something and we were coming up in 2022.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: And I think that maybe we did discuss it explicitly, but I think we kind of felt like that would be an obvious pressure point for the Chinese to release political prisoners before the Beijing Games, and Beijing Games came and went and more and more people just were in prison.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: So we're into it more for the long haul now.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: So we're a 501c3, a registered US charity based in Washington DC.
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: We've got offices in DC as well as in London.
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: We primarily I guess you'd say a lot of focus anyway on governments, but especially on legislatures parliament in the UK, congress in the US.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: Part of that is moral, part of it is trying to get legislation introduced or laws kind of more fully enforced, whether they're sanctions against human rights violators in Hong Kong or moves to shut their diplomatic outposts.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: Hong Kong has a really favorable system where they have economic and trade offices in 14 cities around the world.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: They were great back when Hong Kong was free and now they've become kind of wolf warrior outposts.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: Even, it seems, in the UK espionage dens.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: We're trying to raise the cost for what China's doing to Hong Kong.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: We also do a lot of media work.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: Obviously.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: I've written this book, but we've got a great staff that's just out there interacting with media people, with politicians, again trying to keep the message, keep the spotlight on Hong Kong.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: We also do research.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: So we've, and last year we've had three very strong research pieces.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: One looks at the way in which religion is being increasingly brought under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, even in Hong Kong, despite promises to the international community that religious freedom would remain untouched after Chinese rule.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: We did a piece on the role of foreign judges.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: There are a number of foreign judges in Hong Kong courts and again we think this is giving aid and comfort to some very bad people who don't believe in rule of law.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: And the third was a really detailed report that I think has moved the needle a lot, looking at Hong Kong's role in sanctions evasion.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: So Hong Kong used to be, it's a free port.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: A lot of stuff goes through there, but it's increasingly being used to well, whether it's money laundering or especially evade technology-related sanctions.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: So Hong Kong is a key, if not the most important node in technology smuggling that's used for the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: So that's something that we see.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: Hong Kong has an importance, a role that's way beyond a city of seven and a half million people, halfway around the world from Washington DC.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: It actually has serious national security implications.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: So research, media and legislative government work.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining me today.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you for writing this great biography of Jimmy Lai and talking about the work of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: There's a lot we didn't touch on the influence of Tiananmen Square on Jimmy's thinking, many other matters, his time in Taiwan and a lot more about his career, as well as about the trial itself and the Occupy Central Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: But I really encourage everyone to get a copy of this book, give it as a gift.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: People need to know the story of Jimmy Lai and we'll be hearing a lot more about him, I hope, in the next few months and pray that it's because he will have been released from his captivity in Hong Kong.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: Any last words, mark?
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: Thanks for your interest and just to underscore what you just said, I mean none of us fighting for freedom have armies at our disposal, but you know we do have moral right on our side and we do have elected officials who can influence China.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: And so I think if we can keep the eyes of the world on Hong Kong, on Jimmy Lai and the other political prisoners, we really have a strong chance of some meaningful change or at least meaningful amelioration of some of these conditions and of getting some of the prisoners out, and that would be a step that would be a really important step.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, thanks for your support, Thanks for everybody who's watched and everything they're doing.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: The book is called the Troublemaker.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much, mark Clifford, for joining me today.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, roger.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership podcast.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.