On 8 December 2025, Lai Chee-ying, also known as Jimmy Lai, spent his seventy-eighth birthday in solitary confinement, a guest of the People’s Republic of China.
At the age of twelve, Lai entered Hong Kong as a stowaway from Canton. There, he had once been the scion of a wealthy business family—before the Communist Party seized power. From a life of comfort and security, he was reduced to child labour in a garment factory, earning US$8 per month. From that humble beginning, he founded Giordano in 1981. The company grew to employ 8,000 people across 2,400 shops in thirty countries. Lai elevated himself to the ranks of Hong Kong’s richest men.
He was not satisfied.
In 1995, as the Hong Kong handover loomed, Lai founded Apple Daily, investing US$100 million of his own money. Presumably, with memories of his Canton childhood still haunting him, he wielded the newspaper in defence of civil liberties, openly supporting the pro-democracy movement and the Umbrella Revolution. His reward was a cascade of criminal convictions: unauthorised assembly—sentences of twelve, eight and fourteen months; participation in the 2020 Tiananmen vigil—fourteen months; fraud—sixty-nine months. All culminating, just a week ago, in a guilty verdict, with an anticipated sentence of life imprisonment.
What compels a wealthy, secure businessman—rich as Croesus, a British national since 1996, free to make his home anywhere in the world—to knowingly face life imprisonment, much of it likely to be spent in solitary confinement?
One might understand the recklessness of callow university students. But how does one comprehend such a decision by an elderly, hard-bitten businessman, fully aware of the consequences of his actions?
Yet Lai persisted.
Now incarcerated, he has lost considerable weight. He is in chronic ill health—his physical condition frail, his mental state precarious. Lai is a desperately vulnerable seventy-eight-year-old man.
Will the Chinese government create a martyr of him, or release him to garner goodwill, allowing him to soon die in peace? Will Britain develop a backbone thus far unseen and act to rescue one of its own nationals?
The loss of one man does not affect himself alone, nor merely his community. His loss diminishes us all.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
— John Donne
