There are moments when repression does not arrive with tanks or gunfire, but with paperwork, court dates, and the slow suffocation of words. Hong Kong is living one of those moments. And at its center stands Jimmy Lai — a frail, stubborn figure whose imprisonment tells the story of a city losing its voice.
Jimmy Lai is not a revolutionary in the romantic sense. He did not grow up throwing stones or quoting manifestos. He arrived in Hong Kong as a poor refugee from mainland China, a teenager who escaped famine and ideological suffocation. In the former British colony he found something rare: a system where effort could become opportunity, and where speaking freely was not a crime. He built a fortune in fashion, then something far more dangerous — a newspaper.
Apple Daily was loud, populist, imperfect, sometimes crude. But it was free. And in Hong Kong, that mattered more than elegance. It spoke in a language people understood, questioned power openly, and refused to bend when Beijing’s shadow began to stretch across the harbor.
That refusal is why Jimmy Lai is in prison today.
Officially, he is accused of fraud and of violating the National Security Law. In reality, his crime is simpler: believing that the promises made to Hong Kong were meant to be kept. “One country, two systems” was supposed to protect freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, and civil liberties for fifty years after the 1997 handover. That promise is now an empty shell.
The National Security Law imposed by Beijing in 2020 changed everything. Its language is deliberately vague; its reach is absolute. “Subversion,” “collusion,” “secession” — words elastic enough to stretch around almost any act of dissent. Courts that once prided themselves on independence now operate under political gravity. Bail is denied. Trials are delayed. The process itself becomes the punishment.
Jimmy Lai’s trial is emblematic. A man in his mid-seventies, repeatedly denied bail, facing charges that could imprison him for life. His newspaper has been shut down, its assets frozen, its journalists harassed or forced into exile. Newsrooms emptied not by force, but by fear.
Walking today through Hong Kong, you feel something subtle but profound has changed. The city still functions. Trams run. Malls sparkle. Finance flows. But the conversations have shifted. Voices lower. Jokes stop halfway. Words are weighed before being spoken. The city has learned caution — the first reflex of an unfree society.
China insists this is about stability. That dissent threatened order. That foreign forces poisoned Hong Kong. It is a familiar script. Order over liberty. Harmony over truth. But stability built on silence is brittle. It does not resolve tension; it buries it.
Beijing’s approach to Hong Kong is not an anomaly — it is a template. Control the narrative. Criminalize memory. Redefine patriotism as obedience. The repression is not only political; it is cultural. History is rewritten. School curricula adjusted. Media domesticated. Even language is disciplined.
Jimmy Lai resists this not with weapons, but with presence. He has refused exile. Refused deals. Refused silence. In court, he stands as a reminder that freedom is not abstract — it is embodied. It lives, or dies, in individual choices.
What makes his story particularly uncomfortable is that it exposes the fragility of assumptions many of us held. That economic integration would soften authoritarianism. That prosperity would lead to openness. That Hong Kong’s uniqueness was irreversible. All comforting ideas. All wrong.
The former British colony was not swallowed overnight. It was compressed. Gradually. Methodically. Through laws, arrests, and the quiet removal of alternatives. By the time the world noticed, much of the damage was already done.
Jimmy Lai’s imprisonment is not just about one man. It is about the message sent to every journalist, publisher, teacher, and citizen: freedom is conditional, temporary, revocable. It exists only at the pleasure of power.
In my travels through Asia, I have learned that repression rarely announces itself loudly. It prefers bureaucracy to brutality, procedure to spectacle. Hong Kong today still looks free — but it no longer sounds free. And silence, once learned, is hard to unlearn.
History will remember Jimmy Lai not for his wealth or his newspaper, but for his refusal to accept that silence was inevitable. In a city taught to lower its voice, he chose to speak until the end.
And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous act of all.
It is not the first time I have written about Hong Kong’s changes, or about the transformations the Chinese government is pushing through to uproot the independence and civic culture that defined this place for decades. I fear that, before long, there will be very little left to say.
Photos from walks in the night across North Point and Central in HK, hand in hand with my Leica M11 Monochrom and Summilux 35mm.
Discover more from VITA VISSUTA
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hope not too long… but the subject is exiting!
Discussing statecraft is always a delicate exercise. Doing so in relation to China is even more challenging, particularly for Western audiences whose political categories are shaped by radically different historical trajectories. To avoid abstraction, it is useful to begin with a concrete case: Jimmy Lai.
At first glance, separating the fate of an individual dissident from the structure of an entire political system may seem artificial. In reality, the two are inseparable. Jimmy Lai’s case is not an anomaly; it is a diagnostic.
Consider a simple figure: 0.000091%. This percentage emerges when one groups Jimmy Lai with a handful of well-known Chinese dissidents—Liu Xiaobo, Xu Zhiyong, Ilham Tohti—multiplies that number by 1,000, and divides the result by the theoretical number of Chinese voters, estimated at approximately 1.1 billion. The number appears vanishingly small. Yet it is precisely this scarcity that reveals the system’s deterrent effectiveness.
Under contemporary Chinese governance, nothing confers immunity. Jimmy Lai is elderly, non-violent, religiously motivated (Catholic), legally articulate, and internationally known. He advocates values commonly regarded in the West as uncontroversial: freedom of expression, independent media, civil society, and rule-of-law liberalism. None of these characteristics offer protection.
The reason is structural. From Beijing’s perspective, liberalism implies limits to Party sovereignty; pluralism implies alternative sources of legitimacy; independent media implies an uncontrollable narrative. As a result, ideas themselves are treated as threats. Once dissent challenges sovereign narrative control, neither wealth nor visibility provides shelter.
To understand why this is so, one must briefly outline China’s political architecture. China’s effective electorate is not its population, but the membership of the Chinese Communist Party—around 99 million people, roughly 7% of the total. Even within this group, participation is strictly hierarchical: candidates are vetted, dissent is sanctioned, and outcomes are largely predetermined.
Below this level, elections in the sense familiar to European citizens do not exist. At village or neighborhood level, limited voting may occur, but candidates are pre-selected, there is no party competition, no national impact, and no upward scalability.
At the apex stands the National People’s Congress, comprising approximately 3,000 delegates selected indirectly. Dominated by the Communist Party, the NPC performs a largely ratifying function. Since its members are not elected by universal suffrage, this system amounts to representation without electoral sovereignty —in other words, controlled intra-elite selection rather than electoral democracy.
Once this structure is clear, the implications are stark. Any intellectual activity that falls outside regulatory boundaries becomes a latent risk. Resilience, moral conviction, or legal sophistication may delay consequences, but they do not prevent them. Sooner or later, enforcement arrives.
Yet the analysis cannot end here. Over the past four decades, China has risen to become the world’s second-largest economy in a broad sense. Could such a transformation have occurred without centralized, coercive governance? There is no clear counterfactual, nor do historical examples from Soviet or Fascist regimes offer reassuring parallels.
It also appears undeniable that many Chinese citizens feel genuine pride in their country’s global position —its economic weight, military capacity, political influence, and industrial strength.
The unresolved question is therefore moral rather than empirical. Would comparable success have been possible within a democratic framework, perhaps resembling European models? And if not, are these outcomes worth the price of silence, compliance, and obedience?
There is no easy answer. But the question itself cannot be avoided.
Thanks for the stimulating comment!