President Trump has intervened in the case of Jimmy Lai, the British-Hong Kong businessman and newspaper proprietor in court for opposing Beijing, saying he hoped to “save” him as his trial nears an end.
Trump was asked about Lai’s case in an interview with Fox News Radio, just as closing arguments were due to start in the trial in Hong Kong — brought under the territory’s new national security laws. Lai, 77, who is in failing health and has been held in solitary confinement for more than four years, is deteriorating fast, according to his son.
Trump said: “I’m going to do everything I can to save him. I’m going to do everything.” He said he had already mentioned the case to President Xi, and suggested he would do so again, even though Xi would “not exactly be thrilled”.
President Trump pledged to speak to President Xi about Lai
WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES
He added: “It was a nasty period of time in the history of China. [Lai’s] name has already entered the circle of things that we’re talking about, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Lai, who was born on the Chinese mainland, was one of Hong Kong’s most colourful entrepreneurs during the latter days of British rule, setting up an Asia-wide clothes retailing chain. He then went into journalism, founding Apple Daily, a rabble-rousing, sensationalist tabloid that was heavily critical of the Communist Party as Beijing exerted its sway in the territory after the handover from Britain in 1997.
Lai supported student protests against the security and extradition laws, and became one of the former’s first victims when it was finally forced through. Arrested in 2020, he has spent most of the intervening period in jail.
His trial, for “colluding with foreign forces” and “seditious publication” has been as colourful as his life. Though visibly weakened, he gave evidence in his defence for 50 days — assailing the law and the Communist Party and describing himself as a political prisoner.
It is a major test case for the territory’s two new national security laws, which impose long sentences up to life imprisonment for a range of political crimes. These include promoting “secession”, sedition, or other ways of challenging the rule of the Communist Party in Hong Kong or the mainland.
Among criticisms from international human rights groups, it has drawn attention to the continued role of judges from the British Commonwealth who sit on Hong Kong’s highest court. They include Lord Hoffmann and Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, both former UK Supreme Court judges.
Last year, Neuberger was on a bench which ruled against Lai, Martin Lee Chu-ming, Hong Kong’s former Democratic Party leader, and other activists, upholding their convictions and prison sentences for unlawful assembly over a protest in 2019.
Lai’s son, Sebastian, who is living outside Hong Kong, has told interviewers in recent weeks that he fears his father’s time is “running out”. He has a heart condition.
Lai’s wife, Teresa, and their son, Sebastian
ISAAC LAWRENCE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Hong Kong has insisted Lai was receiving proper medical care and said that he was in solitary confinement at his own request, which his son denies.
Closing arguments were due to begin on Thursday, but were postponed because of a typhoon. On Friday, Lai appeared in court, looking much thinner than his pre-trial portly self, and lawyers for both sides and the judges asked that he receive medical checks before the case resumed.
Sir Keir Starmer raised Lai’s case publicly in his first meeting with Xi after becoming prime minister last year, and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has been keen to raise human rights issues in dealings with Beijing.
Trump has shown less interest in human rights cases, focusing instead on battles with Beijing over tariffs, trade and technology.
However, he has met Sebastian Lai and described his father — a fellow billionaire with a reputation as a showman — as a “good guy”. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” advisers are generally split over China, some wanting to reduce confrontations with Beijing in pursuit of an “American First” strategy, others, currently dominant, demanding it be challenged over its rising military power.
Some strongly anti-communist Maga supporters have taken up the cause of Chinese dissidents, though it has sometimes backfired. Steve Bannon, a Trump strategist in the president’s first term, took up with Guo Wengui — also known as Miles Kwok — a Chinese businessman who “defected” to the United States and claimed to be a leader of the exiled opposition to the Party.
In fact, he was on the run for embezzling huge amounts of money, and was eventually jailed in the US for a similar scam in which he fleeced Maga supporters of $1 billion in investment funds.
Lai is a very different case, however, whose political integrity few question. Trump and Xi are due to meet later this year, though a precise date has not been set.
China would have liked Trump to come to Beijing in September for its commemorations of the end of the Second World War — the people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression, as it is known in China — but the chances of that visit being agreed are now receding.