Speak up for brave dissident Jimmy Lai — and for Hong Kong

After 21 grueling months, Jimmy Lai’s national security trial is finally wrapping up in Hong Kong.  

This week Lai, China’s most famous political prisoner, may finally learn whether he will ever again taste the freedoms he so passionately championed as a self-made entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and Catholic convert — and for which he is now being prosecuted. 

Perhaps more importantly, the court’s sentence will also reveal how completely the Chinese Communist Party has swallowed Hong Kong.

Since 2020, the CCP has methodically chipped away at the region’s “separate system” — the social and economic order that Beijing solemnly promised to respect when Britain handed Hong Kong over in 1997.

But Lai’s arrest, and the arrests of some 2,000 other pro-democracy activists, prove how thoroughly Hong Kong’s freedoms of speech, press and peaceful protest are being suffocated. 

Civil rights and liberties across the board are now on trial, along with Lai.  

Hong Kong’s vaunted legal system, built on British principles of fairness and the rule of law, once protected the economic vibrancy that set Hong Kong apart from mainland China.

But Beijing’s National Security Law, passed in 2020, thoroughly corroded justice with its vague outlawing of “colluding with foreign powers.”

Moreover, prosecutors are applying the law ex post facto to Lai, based on his pre-2020 publication of Apple News, then Hong Kong’s most outspoken pro-democracy newspaper — and the special security court hearing his case boasts a 100% conviction rate.  

That means the only open question this week is the extent of Lai’s sentence.

If the judges choose to be lenient, they could help redeem the rigged judicial process over which they preside.

The NSL carries a possible sentence of life imprisonment, and in November, 45 Hong Kong dissidents received sentences of up to 10 years under its terms.  

Lai, a 77-year-old diabetic, has already been held in the maximum-security Stanley Prison for five years. Any additional prison time means he’ll likely die behind bars.

Lai’s health has deteriorated during his years of solitary confinement in a small, sweltering cement cell. Last week he developed heart palpitations that delayed court proceedings. 

China’s political prisoners have reported relentless ideological indoctrination, torture, beatings and worse: Some Uyghur Muslims, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetan Buddhists and Catholic bishops have in recent years mysteriously disappeared or died in CCP custody. 

Peng Lifa, who became known as “Bridge Man” in 2022 when he unfurled a banner denouncing Chinese communism on a Beijing bridge, was arrested immediately after the incident — and hasn’t been heard from since.

Lai’s family has pleaded for him to be released to the United Kingdom, where he holds dual citizenship and owns a home.

And while the CCP is not known for clemency, especially for a fierce critic like Lai, there may be grounds to hope for an early release.

The most useful precedent may be the case of David Lin, a Taiwanese-American Christian pastor. 

Sentenced to life in prison after being convicted on trumped-up charges of evangelizing, Lin was locked up for 18 years in a jail for foreigners where the slightest infraction — sharing food, hanging socks up incorrectly — brought harsh restrictions.

Last October, reportedly after a US prisoner exchange, the CCP freed the ailing 68-year-old Lin and allowed him to return to the United States.

China also has been known to parole very sick prisoners of conscience like Liu Xiaobo, the first Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate. 

Authorities imprisoned Liu for “subversion” in 2008 after he called for the end to China’s one-party system. 

The CCP granted his release in 2017, three years before his 11-year sentence ended, and he died of liver cancer two weeks later.

And when a case causes the CCP to worry about hits to its international image, it may punish more discreetly with house arrests and secret detentions — typically without due process. 

Seven Roman Catholic bishops are among those now indefinitely detained without trial, and Hong Kong’s world-famous Cardinal Joseph Zen has been under investigation for violating the NSL since 2022. 

The CCP tightly restricts Zen’s travel and has silenced his criticisms by publicly threating to confiscate the island’s Catholic schools.

All this means international voices in London, Washington and beyond must raise the alarm about Lai’s imminent sentencing.  

President Donald Trump should press the issue, too, perhaps starting with a push to rename the street connected to China’s Embassy in Washington as “Jimmy Lai Way.”

Such a gesture would honor a true hero of freedom— while posting a very public rebuke of the CCP’s repression.

Nina Shea is the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.