Yet we do.
Pourquoi?:
July 1 marks the 25th anniversary of the British “handover” of Hong Kong to China. When the last governor of Hong Kong, Christopher Patten, said at the rainy midnight ceremony that the “Hong Kong people will determine Hong Kong’s future,” he was thinking about handover in the first sense. It turned out to be the second.
July 1, 1997, was the beginning of the “one country, two systems” agreement between Beijing and London. For 50 years, Hong Kong would retain its democratic institutions, civil rights and free economy.
China did as totalitarians do, however, and broke its promise. Halfway through the 50-year agreement, there is one country, two styles of oppression — fierce and fiercer. Hong Kong and its free people were handed over to the dragon.
Beijing has arrested many Hongkongers under its despotic “national security law,” which essentially makes it a crime to criticized the Chinese Communist regime. I wrote recently about the arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zen, who’s now out on bail awaiting “trial” under the law. Yet the most prominent arrest was of Jimmy Lai, a rags-to-riches textile and fashion billionaire who could have easily fled, but chose to stay in Hong Kong.
After making his fortune in fashion, Lai turned his attention to media, knowing that a free country needs a free press. He started Next Magazine and the Apple Daily newspaper, which were massively successful in telling the truths that totalitarians try to suppress.
As Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping — let us dispense with the faux respect of “president” and call him what he is: the head of the Communist party apparatus — tightened the screws on Hong Kong, it was only a matter of time before Beijing came for Jimmy Lai.
He was arrested in August 2020 and released on bail. In December 2020, his bail was revoked and the court jailed Lai until April 2021. Then he was sentenced to an additional 14 months in jail for his role in “illegal” protests. Recently, Beijing has rustled up some “fraud” charges to further incarcerate Lai.
Some have said that Jimmy Lai is the Nelson Mandela of China, and that #FreeJimmyLai should become a global anthem, as “Free Nelson Mandela” was in the 1980s. That’s not quite right. Jimmy Lai, given his prominence and power, and his commitment to non-violence from the start, is more like Mahatma Gandhi or Thomas More.
Or perhaps Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who once wrote of his time in a Soviet gulag: “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Jimmy Lai knew prosperity better than most. Yet it is his soul, not his fortune, that is his greatest contribution to Hong Kong.
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