A tragic moment in China

After billionaire entrepreneur Jimmy Lai was arrested by communist authorities again on New Year’s Eve in 2020, he languished in prison for nearly five years. Much of that time was spent in solitary confinement, a particularly cruel form of detention for someone who was 73 years old at the time of his arrest. Now 78, Jimmy Lai spent 1,810 days in prison before being convicted in mid-December of 2025. He faces a sentence of life in prison for the guilty verdict on charges of collusion and conspiracy against the government. This sham of a case is a moral scandal.

Who is Jimmy Lai? As a youth in mainland China, Lai went to British-governed Hong Kong to seek a better life. And he did so, with success first in the retail fashion industry. But he was forced to sell his ownership share of the Giordano company amid crackdowns by the Chinese government in the 1990s. He then went into the publishing industry, opening the Chinese-language Apple Daily newspaper in 1995. This became a media empire and a bastion of pro-democracy journalism in Hong Kong. But when the United Kingdom returned governance of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, it seemed inevitable that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would eventually move to limit civil liberties.

After years of minor incursions into Hong Kong’s autonomy, the CCP finally began to assert its authority more directly in 2019, which was met with significant protest. Jimmy Lai was a key figure in advocacy for continued freedom in Hong Kong. For decades Lai had been a man marked for punishment, and during these massive protests the Chinese government finally took the opportunity to arrest and finally now to convict him.

Lai is a naturalized British citizen, which seems to have done little to ameliorate his harsh treatment over the last five years. At the time of his arrest, Lai’s net worth was estimated to be more than $1 billion. What would motivate someone to set aside the privileges of such massive wealth and walk in solidarity with protestors on the streets of Hong Kong?

In Lai’s own words, he was driven by his Catholic faith and his principled commitment to basic human rights to act in solidarity with those facing oppression in Hong Kong. C. S. Lewis once defined courage as “not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” Lai displayed such civil courage by casting off the trappings of affluence and taking the form of a servant of the people and their liberties. As he put it ahead of his arrest, “This is a time for sacrifice.”

Lai has made great sacrifices in gratitude for the opportunities that a free Hong Kong provided him. But he also recognizes that those blessings come from God, and so his continued commitment to sacrifice manifests a greater hope, despite the very real prospect that he will end his earthly life in prison.

And while such hope is grounded in a firm trust in God’s providence, the earthly calculus looks grim. Just days before Lai’s conviction in a Chinese court, the largest pro-democracy political party in Hong Kong announced its dissolution. As the Associated Press reports, former chair of the Democratic Party in Hong Kong, Yeung Sum, summarized the situation: “Now, it’s a low point, but we haven’t lost all hope.”

Lai’s conviction and the party’s dissolution certainly do indicate that the prospects for freedom in Hong Kong are dim, as they are for mainland China as well. And yet while there is life, there is reason for hope. And what is impossible for human beings is not impossible for God. There are indications that God is at work in China to bring people to faith in Christ, and wherever there is religious conviction then there are prospects for greater liberty.

Tertullian once observed that the blood of Chrisitan martyrs was the seed of the church on earth. We can pray that Jimmy Lai’s sacrifice will likewise nourish the cause of faith and freedom in Hong Kong today.