Mark L. Clifford on Jimmy Lai, with Evan Osnos

Mark L. Clifford on Jimmy Lai, with Evan Osnos

Jimmy Lai escaped mainland China when he was twelve years old, at the height of a famine that killed tens of millions. In Hong Kong, he hustled and often slept overnight on a table in a clothing factory where he did odd jobs. At twenty-one, he was running a factory. By his mid-twenties, he owned one and was supplying sweaters and shirts to some of the biggest brands in the United States, from Polo to The Limited. His ideas about retail led him to create Giordano in 1981, and with it “fast fashion.” A restless entrepreneur, as Giordano prepared to go public, he was thinking about a dining concept that would disrupt Hong Kong’s fast-food industry. But then came Tiananmen Square democracy protest and the massacre of 1989.

His reaction to the violence was to enter the media industry to push China toward more freedoms. He started a magazine, Next, to advocate for democracy in Hong Kong. Then, just two years before the city was to return to Chinese control, he founded the Apple Daily newspaper. Its mix of bold graphics, gossip, local news, and opposition to the Chinese Communist Party was an immediate hit. For more than two decades, Lai used Apple and Next as part of a personal push for democracy—in weekly columns, at rallies and marches, and, memorably, sitting in front of a tent during the 2014 Occupy Central movement.

Lai took his activism abroad, traveling frequently to Washington. China reacted with fury in 2019 when he met with Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. A draconian new security law came into effect in Hong Kong in mid-2020, effectively making human rights advocacy and free speech a crime and censorship a fact. Lai was arrested and held without bail before being convicted on trumped-up charges. At the end of 2023, a lengthy national security trial, that could see him jailed for life, alleged “collusion with foreign forces” and printing seditious materials. China’s most famous political prisoner has been held in solitary confinement since December 2020, while his supporters and family continue the fight to have him freed.

Mark L. Clifford is the author of Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere. He is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, an NGO dedicated to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law for the people of Hong Kong. Previously, he was executive director of the Hong Kong–based Asia Business Council, and a board director at Next Digital, the Hong Kong media giant founded and majority-owned by Jimmy Lai. During his twenty-eight years in Hong Kong, he served as editor-in-chief of both English-language newspapers, the South China Morning Post and The Standard, of which he was also publisher. He holds a PhD in Hong Kong history from the University of Hong Kong.

Evan Osnos has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. He is also co-host of The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast and a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of four books, including “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China,” which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, a New York Times bestseller in 2025, was “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.” Prior to The New Yorker, he worked as the Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, where he shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 and in 2008. He lives with his family near Washington, D.C.