Jimmy Lai and the future of our freedom

I once sat with Jimmy Lai on a remote Hong Kong beach as he told me the story of his life.

- Bret Stephens

How his mother had been taken to a labour camp after the Communist Party came to power in mainland China. How a taste of chocolate given to him by a passenger from Hong Kong had inspired him to stow away on a boat to the British colony. How he had worked his way up from the floor of a glove factory and how he had started Giordano, the casual clothes maker, the name inspired by a napkin from a New York pizza shop. How the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre galvanised his political activism. How he had started the pro-democracy newspaper The Apple Daily with the slogan "An Apple a Day Keeps the Liars Away."

"I believe in the media by delivering information, you're actually delivering freedom," Jimmy told The New York Times in 2020. It's as precise a defence of an independent press as I've ever seen.

From the beach we went for lunch and talked about politics, political philosophy and religious liberty. That was in 2009, a few years after Jimmy had won a showdown with the Hong Kong government over a proposed security law that would have gutted Hong Kong's freedoms - freedoms that were supposedly guaranteed for 50 years after Britain returned the territory to China in 1997 under the promise of "one country, two systems".