Monday’s sentencing of Jimmy Lee to 20 years in prison is a profound injustice for the publisher, but it also marks the symbolic end of an era. This ensures that Hong Kong, which was promised autonomy for 50 years after 1997, is now firmly under Beijing’s iron boot.
Jimmy Lai in 2020.The sentence marks the end of the Apple Daily owner’s 26-month trial on charges of treason and conspiracy to collude with foreign powers. But it also marks the end of the larger dream that Hong Kong — under Chinese rule — could preserve the independence that transformed it from a barren wasteland to a beacon of hope and opportunity.
The question of Hong Kong’s future hung in the balance when Britain and China issued a joint declaration in 1984 outlining the terms of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. Will the Chinese Communist Party maintain the rights and freedoms necessary for a free-market society? Sad experience said no, and we expressed our doubts at the time.
“The gist of the Declaration,” we wrote more than 40 years ago, “is that 5 million mostly free people will soon have their futures determined by a totalitarian government known for neither tolerance nor stability.” That editorial was titled “Promise, Promise.”
With Jimmy Lai, our fears are realized. A 20-year sentence could amount to a death sentence for the 78-year-old newspaper man. He is ill and has spent most of the past five years in solitary confinement, with solitary windows to block sunlight. Along the way, the Hong Kong government denied him the lawyer of his choice and stole his newspaper without a court order. Six former Apple Daily executives also received multi-year sentences on Monday.
This is not how Hong Kong is governed under Britain. This is not how a world trade and financial center works. But this is the way of Hong Kong under Chinese rule.
Regardless of what the Hong Kong government says, people living there know that Beijing is the real authority. Apple Daily readers who lined up for tickets to Monday’s sentencing did so because they saw Mr. Ly standing up for them. They saw in him the qualities that had freed and enriched their city—and had the courage to risk arrest and imprisonment rather than abandon his principles or flee abroad.
Some hoped that Hong Kong’s judiciary might be the only institution to prevent Hong Kong from being swallowed up by the Chinese system. It was never meant to be. In June 2024, British judge Lord Jonathan Sumption resigned from Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. As he wrote in the Financial Times, the rule of law in Hong Kong is “deeply compromised in any area the government feels strongly about.”
Mr. Lai has been convicted of national-security charges and will die in prison if nothing is done. President Trump, who has raised Mr Lai’s plight with President Xi Jinping, is scheduled to visit Beijing in April. At this point someone in Beijing should be asking whether it is really in China’s interest to create the bad press and torture that comes from keeping an old man in captivity.
A bipartisan group of five US congressmen wrote to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo on Friday nominating Jimmy Lee for the prize. There is no one else worthy. And Beijing’s message to Taiwan about what life would be like under Chinese Communist Party rule could not be clearer.
