Jimmy Lai The rise and fall of Hong Kong's chief 'troublemaker'

Yesterday’s verdict convicting Jimmy Lai of national security offences was expected.

- Helen Davidson Hong Kong Amy Hawkins

Long a thorn in the side of Beijing, Lai, a 78-year-old media tycoon and activist, was a primary target of the most recent and definitive crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Authorities cast him as a traitor and a criminal.

Lai’s trial was one of the last unfinished national security prosecutions of Hong Kong’s high-profile activists, over their involvement in the 2019 protests. Hundreds of activists, lawyers and politicians have been pursued and jailed, or chased into exile. But few have captured global attention like Lai, whose life and career has developed in tangent with Hong Kong’s sputtering walk towards democracy, and then its fall.

“The trajectory of his life reflects the history of Hong Kong itself,” said Kevin Yam, a Australian-Hong Kong lawyer, who is subject to a Hong Kong arrest warrant for his pro-democracy activism.

Lai has been behind bars since 2020, either on remand or serving the five separate sentences he has been given for protest-related offences totalling almost 10 years, and a fraud allegation his supporters say was trumped up.

Yesterday’s convictions could result in a life sentence. His family already fears he might not live to see freedom. In the weeks before the verdict, his children issued alarming new warnings over his health.

Lai’s rise is a rags to riches tale. At 12 he left Mao’s China for Hong Kong, where he worked as a child labourer in garment factories, before building a business empire that included the retail chain Giordano, and then a media conglomerate that would lead to him being nicknamed the “Rupert Murdoch of Asia”.

At the time of his first arrest in 2020, Lai was worth an estimated $1.2bn (£900m), according to a biography written by a friend and associate, Mark Clifford. But he was one of the few of Hong Kong’s elite who used their power and wealth for activism.

He wasn’t always political.