The Persecution of Jimmy Lai

The Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th anniversary yesterday, and they had much to celebrate. Since the civil war in 1949 in which the communists under Mao Zedong gained control of the mainland they've managed to slaughter millions of their countrymen. Only the Soviet communists can claim to have accomplished as much.

They achieved this feat through policies like The Great Leap Forward which resulted in mass famine, The Cultural Revolution which cost the lives of anyone who even looked sympathetic to the West, and the slaughters of dissidents such as occurred in 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

The terror still continues to this day for minority groups like the Muslim Uyghurs who survive, if they survive at all, in mass incarceration camps, for Christians who live in constant fear of arrest and dispossession of their property, and for those who exhibit the audacity to tell the world what's actually happening in China.

Among the latter are the doctors at Wuhan who went public early on in the pandemic and promptly disappeared and dissidents in Hong Kong which the Chinese, reneging on their promise to keep Hong Kong autonomous, have censored and persecuted.

One example of these dissidents is a man named Jimmy Lai, a self-made billionaire who is putting everything at risk for his belief in God and the freedom of his fellow Chinese.

Christopher Bedford, senior editor at The Federalist, gives us insight into Lai's story:

Lai’s path to success in Hong Kong began on the floor of a garment factory. He rose quickly, eventually joining management. He saved his money, invested in the stock market, and used the profits to buy a factory and start making clothing for middle-class consumers.

After the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where peaceful pro-democracy protesters were trapped, shrouded in darkness, and run over and gunned down by tanks, Lai sacrificed his stake in his mainland business by printing and selling pro-democracy shirts and starting a tabloid magazine that covered scandal and corruption in the party.

Undeterred by his loss, and still a very wealthy man, Lai channeled his time and fortune toward fighting their evil, enduring arrest, persecution, fire bombings, car attacks, and intimidation for it.

Last week he was arrested again, and his and his company’s finances seized under the auspices of China’s new “national security law.”

What leads a man to sacrifice everything - family, wealth and well-being - in order to stand in protest athwart an evil system? For Jimmy Lai it's his Christian faith:

Stories of his self-made riches and pro-democracy bravery dot corporate media, but unless you dig into the columns of those who’d met him, or read Christian news sources, you might miss what actually drives and fortifies him in the face of a vast and relentless enemy. You’d miss why a serial entrepreneur who has spent his life building and creating is willing to give it all up, and you’d miss the truth behind why.

“The Communists,” he told Economic Strategy Institute President Clyde Berkowitz, “think they can buy and or intimidate everyone off, create their own reality, and write their own history. Effectively, they assume the role of God. They are kind of a religion or an anti-religion.”

‘They have initiation into the party as a kind of baptism. They have self-criticism as a kind of confession of sins, re-education as a kind of penance, and elevation to hero of the party as a kind of sainthood. And, of course, at least Mao [Zedong] has a kind of everlasting life as a photo smiling down on Tiananmen Square and as an embalmed corpse in a casket in the square.’

‘But the party and its members do not have souls. In fact, they are dead men walking, because the truth is not in them.’

“Life,” he told the Catholic Napa Institute in an October interview, “is more than just bread; life has a greater meaning.” “If you believe in the Lord,” Lai told the Napa Institute, “if you believe that all suffering has a reason, and the Lord is suffering with me, it will definitely define the person I am becoming so I am at peace with it.”

“I am what I am. I am what I believe. I cannot change it. And if I can’t change it, I have to accept my fate with praise.”

So because Jimmy Lai refuses to bend the knee to the false god of the communists, he languishes today in prison. Meanwhile, American leftists admire the communist regime and American university and corporate executives prostrate themselves before Beijing's ruling class so that they can reap the economic benefits of China's vast market.

Bedford writes:

How many American leaders, how many corporate businessmen, do just that [what Lai has done]? How many executives at Disney and Nike, the NBA and Blizzard Entertainment, in Apple and Hollywood do just that? Maybe no other alive.

Instead, how many of them bow before a thieving, lying, murderous godless slave state in exchange for access to growing markets? How many colleges and universities bow to that state’s every wish and every spy in exchange for paying full tuition into their already bloated coffers? How much do they make? ....

In Western universities and board rooms, souls are cheap. But Lai’s is not. “What separates Jimmy Lai,” a friend in corporate consulting wrote me, “from many of this era’s modern-day princes is that he deeply cares about something beyond his own money, power and status.”

There's something deeply, morally disgusting about the contrast between Lai and our corporate and university elites. It's one thing to acknowledge that few of us, perhaps, would have the courage to make the kind of sacrifice that Jimmy Lai is making, it's entirely another to seek to profit by kissing the feet of people that murder both the body and the spirit of millions of their countrymen and who tyrannize people like Jimmy Lai.

There's more to Bedford's column on Lai at the link.