After more than 1,400 days in prison, Hong Kong’s most famous entrepreneur took the stand in late November to defend himself against charges of undermining national security. Jimmy Lai, who started as a sweater manufacturer and expanded to publishing, said his goal was not to undermine Hong Kong, but simply to inform. As he explained in court, “The more information you have, the more you are in the know, the more you are free.”
It’s peculiar, after four decades of China’s unparalleled economic success, that Beijing now appears singularly threatened by a man who is, above all, a businessman. Anyone who travels to China knows the country is all about business, nowhere more so than in the autonomous city of Hong Kong, a former British colony known for its go-go free-market spirit. Yet for four years, the man many Hong Kongers proudly claim as a hero has been sitting in solitary confinement in the maximum-security Stanley Prison.
Jimmy Lai is accused of breaking national security laws as he pursued the protection of democratic rights in Hong Kong, mainly through the publishing company he ran, Next Digital, and its flagship newspaper Apple Daily. Lai’s development of the publishing company was as creative and consumer-focused as the textile, garment, and retail businesses he started before that. The charges are flimsy, centering on Lai’s meetings with then-U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a year before the law he’s alleged to have broken went into effect.
I’ve known Jimmy for three decades. I was on the board of directors of the publicly traded Next Digital when authorities abruptly forced it out of business by freezing our well-funded bank accounts, without even a court order. What surprised me most in researching my biography of Lai was discovering what an extraordinary entrepreneur he was.
Lai, who fled a famine in China and landed in Hong Kong as a stowaway when he was just 12, focused on one thing: giving customers what they wanted, faster than the competition. When he started clothing factories, that meant producing sweaters for companies like the Limited better than anyone else, turning around orders with astonishing speed.
When Lai got bored with making sweaters, he set up an Asia-wide retail clothing chain, Giordano, establishing himself as the father of fast fashion. Uniqlo’s founder Tadashi Yanai (now Japan’s richest man by a long shot) credits Lai with showing him the way when he was setting up shop in the mid-1980s.
Lai was planning his next venture, a move into high-quality Chinese fast food, when the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests broke out and were brutally suppressed in Beijing. He decided to turn his entrepreneurial energies to media, both as a business and because he wanted to push the cause of freedom in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997. In the media, as with manufacturing and retailing, he adopted an outsider’s bold, almost reckless, willingness to do things differently.
He knew that readers wanted to go both low and high, so his publications offered bold headlines, colorful photos, and gossip about stars and politicians, along with free-market business columns, anti-corruption investigative reporting, and an editorial push for democracy. His understanding of the consumer and his insistence on meeting those needs built the most popular media outlet in Hong Kong and Taiwan in just two decades.
Jimmy Lai made untold millions but he never left Hong Kong, even though, with a British passport and houses scattered around the world, he could have done so simply by going to the airport. He stayed and fought for freedom, knowing he was likely to be arrested and jailed.
Other business leaders who have taken a stand in favor of democracy have been shut down or forced overseas in the last few years. The Chickeeduck children’s clothing chain owner, Herbert Chow, was forced to close shop and flee to England after police terrorized his staff and landlords canceled leases. Pro-democracy restaurants and bookstores have been driven out of business with an unending drumbeat of harassment from health and building inspectors and other officials.
Hong Kong’s economy has been limping along in recent years, hammered by its close ties to the enfeebled mainland economy and restrictive COVID policies as well as curbs on personal freedoms that have led hundreds of thousands of the city’s best and brightest to leave—more than 150,000 to Britain alone. Tellingly for a money-obsessed city, the benchmark Hang Seng index has fallen almost one-third since the National Security Law came into effect three-and-half years ago, while the S&P index is up more than 40%. Not long ago, Hong Kong led the world in initial public offerings but these have withered, hitting 20-year lows in the first half of 2024 before showing signs of life in the third quarter.
If authorities are willing to lock up a man who produced a string of successful businesses—two of which were publicly listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong—what does that mean for everyone else?
When a successful businessman can be jailed just for doing his job, it suggests that no one should feel wholly comfortable doing business in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong continues to style itself as Asia’s world city. For years it rivaled London and New York as a global financial center. No more. Global financial centers don’t have political prisoners.
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