Hong Kong Media Tycoon Jimmy Lai’s Conviction Was Years in the Making

Jimmy Lai spent decades criticizing China’s rulers. He faces up to life in prison after a court found him guilty of national security crimes.

In a verdict long foretold by China’s Communist Party, a Hong Kong court on Monday convicted Jimmy Lai, a media mogul and rambunctious critic of the rulers in Beijing, finding him guilty of crimes endangering national security.

The conviction, swathed in the formal garb of a nominally independent judicial system left over from British rule, was never in any real doubt. Mr. Lai, 78, has been pilloried for years by China’s ruling party and its loyalists in Hong Kong as a traitor, a crook and the leader of a subversive “gang of four” who must be severely punished.

In this case, he was convicted of two counts of conspiring with foreign forces to impose sanctions against Hong Kong and another of publishing seditious material in the former British colony. He had already been convicted and imprisoned on fraud charges.

When Mr. Lai was arrested five years ago and released briefly on bail, a group of self-declared Chinese “patriots” gathered outside his home in Kowloon and waved banners warning ominously that “traitors who bring disaster to Hong Kong will not have a good end.”

Monday’s verdict delivered on that warning and brought nearer to a close a case that has crystallized the changes that have swept Hong Kong since the introduction of a harsh national security law in 2020 in response to months of antigovernment street protests that the authorities suppressed.

Mr. Lai, who took part in the protests and supported them through his now defunct newspaper, Apple Daily, was seen by many outside the city’s elite as a symbol of what once made Hong Kong special — noisy irreverence, freewheeling rags-to-riches ambition and an impish disregard for the pomposity of British colonials and the turgid, often menacing, pronouncements of mainland officials.

His preferred language is Cantonese, the dialect of Chinese spoken by most people in Hong Kong, over the Mandarin used by Beijing. Apple and a sister publication, Next magazine, also now shuttered, used Cantonese slang popular with readers while at the other end of the spectrum, party-controlled newspapers in Hong Kong, which sold far fewer copies, wrote in a bloated mix of communist jargon and formal Chinese.

Mr. Lai delighted in taunting fellow tycoons, many of whom repeatedly told him to shut up and parroted Communist Party talking points in pursuit of business on the mainland. He reveled in riling an elite polite society saturated with the hypocrisies of the colonial era and also of the Communist Party. Apple Daily feasted on entertainment gossip, gory crimes and for a time published a regular brothel review by a columnist who went by the name Fat Dragon. But it was also heavy on serious political coverage slanted in favor of demands for more democracy and exposing the riches of China’s top political families and cronyism.

“The establishment hates my guts,” Mr. Lai said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times. “They ask, ‘Why don’t you just let us make money in peace?’ They think I’m a troublemaker,” he said, adding: “I am a troublemaker, but one with a good conscience.”

On the eve of Monday’s the court ruling, members of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, once a boisterous mainstay of the city’s legislative assembly and its largest opposition force, voted to formally disband. The decision left an already crimped political landscape entirely in the hands of carefully vetted politicians whom authorities have judged sufficiently patriotic to take part in limited elections.

China took back control of Hong Kong in 1997, ending 156 years of colonial rule, after promising in a 1984 agreement with Britain that the “previous capitalist system and lifestyle shall remain unchanged for 50 years.” The agreement promised legal protection for rights and freedoms, including those of speech and assembly.

But the arrangement known as “one country, two systems” has frayed as the Hong Kong government, at the party’s behest, has not only snuffed out public protest, previously a regular feature of life in the city, but viewed even mild criticism of Beijing as a threat. It has vowed to uproot “soft resistance,” citing what officials see as signs of foreign subversion in a book fair, music lyrics, a U.S. holiday celebration and environmental groups.

Space for free expression has become so constricted that Hong Kong’s national security police have arrested more than a dozen people since the city’s deadliest fire in decades, a late-November blaze that engulfed seven apartment towers and killed at least 160 people. The authorities have been on heightened alert for what they say are “anti-China forces” looking to exploit the tragedy, but critics have said that the authorities are targeting people who call for greater government accountability.

The charges on which Mr. Lai was convicted can be punished by up to life in prison. A pre-sentencing hearing is set to begin Jan. 12.

In Beijing, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiankui welcomed Mr. Lai’s conviction. The court’s “actions are reasonable, lawful and beyond reproach,” he said, while condemning what he described as a “blatant defamation and smear campaign” by “certain countries” critical of the Hong Kong judiciary.

The guilty verdict drew quick condemnation from Britain’s foreign minister, Yvette Cooper. (Mr. Lai is a British citizen). In a statement posted on X, Ms. Cooper said “the UK condemns the politically motivated prosecution of Jimmy Lai that has resulted in today’s guilty verdict.”

There was no immediate reaction from President Trump, who before his election last year promised “100 percent I’ll get him out. He’ll be easy to get out.” His administration has since curbed its hopes of extracting favors from China. In recent weeks it has worked to calm turbulent relations with Beijing following a trade war truce reached in October during a meeting in South Korea between President Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.

Media outlets in Hong Kong controlled by China’s Communist Party had pronounced Mr. Lai guilty long before the trial started.

A 2020 enumeration of his alleged misdeeds by Wen Wei Po, a party-controlled Hong Kong newspaper, listed 10 “unpardonable crimes,” which ranged from treason to a lack of filial piety and drug use. These, the newspaper predicted, “make it extremely difficult for him to clear his name.”

That Mr. Lai had no real chance of doing that was clear even before his arrest. In a 2017 speech celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, Mr. Xi, China’s leader and the general secretary of its Communist Party, described the red lines which he said it was “absolutely impermissible to cross.” These included “any challenges to the power of the central government in Beijing,” a line that Mr. Lai, an irreverent critic of Beijing authorities, crossed repeatedly.

Mr. Lai, in the party’s telling, was not just a lone troublemaker, a label he welcomed, but the mastermind of a plot to sow chaos. Officials also condemned those they saw as supporting him, including the American diplomat Julie Eadeh, who is now the U.S. consul general in the city; her bosses in the State Department; and other so-called “anti-China elements,” including a former U.S. naval intelligence officer, Mark Simon, who worked as a business adviser to Mr. Lai.

Wen Wei Po, a party newspaper, described Mr. Lai as the “number one political agent painstakingly cultivated by the United States in Hong Kong.”

The evidence for this, rolled out in a fiery propaganda article since his arrest and in prosecutors’ arguments during 156 days of court proceedings, consists mainly of the fact that he met at various times with American officials, made disparaging remarks about the Communist Party, and supported foreign sanctions for the curtailment of basic freedoms guaranteed in the 1984 agreement with Britain. In their 855-page ruling on Monday, the judges said the evidence against Mr. Lai clearly proved him guilty.

An ebullient self-made millionaire and churchgoing Roman Catholic, Mr. Lai fled to Hong Kong at age 12 from China’s neighboring Guangdong province. He made a fortune from a retail clothing chain, Giordano, but later threw himself into publishing, founding Next, a weekly magazine, and Apple Daily, both now defunct.

Unlike many in Hong Kong, he disagreed with young pro-democracy activists who voiced indifference over the state of China and insisted they were not Chinese, but Hong Kongers. A few even called for “independence” for Hong Kong, a cause Mr. Lai never supported.

Each year he attended a candlelight memorial event in Hong Kong for those killed in the Chinese military’s assault on peaceful protesters in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, and voiced support for Chinese dissidents who shared his concern over their country’s direction. The Hong Kong authorities have effectively banned the Tiananmen vigil since 2020, bringing the city into line with the rest of China, where any mention of the 1989 bloodshed is taboo.

Mr. Lai’s quarrel with Beijing, he said in the 2019 interview, was never over patriotism — literally “loving country” in Chinese — but over “loving the party,” a fusion of political and national loyalties at the heart of Mr. Xi’s concept of nation.

“I always feel Chinese because I belong to the older generation,” Mr. Lai said. “I had always hoped that China was changing and would become a democracy. I was wrong. It was wishful thinking.”

David Pierson contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

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