The Acton Institute has produced what Nikolai Wenzel calls a “a hard-hitting, poignant, clean, informative, and infuriating documentary on Jimmy Lai,” the Hong Kong entrepreneur, activist, and founder of the popular Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, who as a young man was influenced by F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
In his Law & Liberty article, Wenzel summarizes the history of Hong Kong as treated in the documentary (“The Hong Konger: Jimmy Lai’s Extraordinary Struggle for Freedom”), including Great Britain’s handover to China in 1997, after which China immediately acted to renege on its pretend-agreement to maintain Hong Kong’s separate system of government for at least 50 years. But the mainland’s full subjugation of Hong Kong was repeatedly thwarted by the protests of many Hong Kongers until China’s imposition of the National Security Law of 2020, a sweeping demolition of democracy and protections of individual rights in Hong Kong.
“Jimmy Lai refused to be cowed by the National Security Law. He has been arrested several times since 2020,” notes Wenzel. “Apple Daily has been shut down. His personal accounts have been frozen by Beijing. He is currently locked up for a six-year sentence for unlawful assembly and sedition, and he awaits a kangaroo court trial under the National Security Law, in which he could receive up to life imprisonment.”
As Paul Jacob points out, when Lai saw how precarious things were becoming for himself and other freedom fighters in Hong Kong, he “could have taken his wealth and left to sip Mai Tais on a sunny beach on the far side of the globe. The student leaders of the protests—the best and the brightest—likewise knew how long their odds were, how dangerous their stand.
“Yet Lai and the protesters stood up to the Chinazis anyway. Why? Because good people must stand up to evil . . . or evil wins.”
