Comment: Trump, the West have abandoned dissidents like Jimmy Lai

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Bret Stephens / The New York Times

I once sat with Jimmy Lai on a remote Hong Kong beach as he told me the story of his life.

How his mother had been taken to a labor camp after the Communist Party came to power in mainland China. How a taste of chocolate given to him by a passenger from Hong Kong had inspired him to stow away on a boat to the British colony. How he had worked his way up from the floor of a glove factory and how he had started Giordano, the casual clothes maker, the name inspired by a napkin from a New York pizza shop. How the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre galvanized his political activism. How he had started the pro-democracy newspaper The Apple Daily with the slogan “An Apple a Day Keeps the Liars Away.”

“I believe in the media by delivering information, you’re actually delivering freedom,” Jimmy told The New York Times in 2020. It’s as precise a defense of an independent press as I’ve ever seen.

From the beach we went for lunch and talked about politics, political philosophy and religious liberty. That was in 2009, a few years after Jimmy had won a showdown with the Hong Kong government over a proposed security law that would have gutted Hong Kong’s freedoms — freedoms that were supposedly guaranteed for 50 years after Britain returned the territory to China in 1997 under the promise of “one country, two systems.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-trump-the-west-have-abandoned-dissidents-like-jimmy-lai/

[DJ Synikus Makisimus]

1. Lai is a dual national who has British citizenship.

He's also a Roman Catholic. There was talk in the European press that both the UK government and the Vatican were holding talks with the PRC to get Lai released. Don't expect to hear any more about it until/unless it happens, though. Oh, and or course you shouldn't expect anything out of the Trump administration. That would be out-of-character.