Saint Jim
The rags-to-riches – and then to-jail – tale of how Jimmy Lai became a billionaire before accepting God and a CCP jail cell is a page-turner despite the hagiographic flaws some critics have seized on.
‘The Troublemaker’
Mark L. Clifford
Publisher : Free Press (December 3, 2024)
Print length : 281 pages
Page numbers source ISBN : 1668027690
THE TROUBLEMAKER author Mark L. Clifford, an American journalist who now heads the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, served on the board of Jimmy Lai’s media company, Next Digital, from 2018 to 2021 – and he makes some bold claims for Lai’s role in Hong Kong’s popular efforts to keep the Chinese Communist Party from getting everything it wanted.
Early in his immensely readable book on Lai’s life – and it is such breathless moments that occasionally let The Troublemaker down – Clifford hails Lai as “literally one in a billion.”
The author writes:
Hong Kong has scores of billionaires, but not one of them dared to stand up to China while the city’s freedoms were whittled away. And Hong Kong has spawned many brave democracy campaigners, but none could nurture the movement with a mass-media spotlight, let alone bankroll it. Lai played a significant role in mounting the biggest democratic challenge to the Chinese Communist Party since the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement … In a conversation in 2020, as the charges against him multiplied, Lai mused: “It is just natural they nail me. I have the newspaper, which is an opposition newspaper supporting the movement. I am very vocal opposing the Communists. I participate in every resistance [that is, demonstration and protest march]. For them, I am a troublemaker.
(That’s the title explained, at least.)
Clifford first met Lai in 1993, and his sprawling array of sources has made it possible for him assemble a narrative that credibly chips away at some of the enigmatic veneer that makes Lai probably the least scrutable dissident – if that is indeed what he is – to ever take on China’s totalitarian regime.
Lai was born in 1947 (approximately) in Shunde, Guangdong Province. They were hard-scrabble times. The country was yet to see an end to the civil war that drove the Nationalists to Taiwan in 1949, and soon it would be clawing its way out of economic isolation imposed by its involvement in the Korean War. It was also – by way of a historically unique road to economic recovery – poised to make a succession of gargantuan blunders courtesy of Chairman Mao Zedong’s maniacal social experiments.
The boy Lai, for whom barbecued field mice were a rare culinary treat and who had to hustle the streets for pocket change to feed himself, wriggling his way to the heights of odd portering jobs at the Hong Kong border town of Lo Wu was a heady achievement.
“I became one of the privileged people, so to speak,” [Jimmy said later] having at the age of eight or nine ingratiated himself with the gang bosses who controlled work at the station.
But then, as Clifford repeatedly reminds us, Lai, from an extremely young age, felt destined for greatness. It was bestowed upon him by his father before the elder Lai deserted his family for Hong Kong. Lai the younger took to foraging for cigarette butts, and re-rolling the contents into cigarettes. The story of how he got from there to billionaire wealth in Hong Kong, is truly riveting, Dickensian stuff and one of the best sections of the book.
At 12, Lai escapes to Hong Kong and sleeps wherever he can in the factories that pay him a pittance for his endless hours of work. But he still knows, despite the hardships – he loses the tip of a finger in a machine accident and his hearing in one ear due to lack of protective tooling gear – he’s launched a new future for himself.
It is a new place to me, the people, their values are all new to me, even their clean beaches are new to me. I come from a very dirty place. Not only the streets, the air, the politics, but also the way that people think are all dirty. It’s not the kind of filth you would find in garbage or dirt, it’s the ugliness in those people’s hearts. Only having seen this kind of ugliness can you then know what filth is. When I looked at the new world ahead of me, I know I have arrived; I have arrived at a world where life is worth living.
Lai is double-back shifting his way up through the ranks of Hong Kong’s burgeoning manufacturing sector and almost inevitably – or so it seems in the reading – ends up with his own stake in the business at just the right moment in Hong Kong’s history.
This is one of many points in the book in which the reader might be forgiven for beginning to wonder whether Lai really is the stuff of which social movements are made. He’s far from a labor activist but he has also barely attended school and is very much, especially in these early Hong Kong years, the capitalist autodidact.
Courting American buyers in search of low-cost suppliers, Lai’s first encounters with ideas of any kind appear to be let-the-market-decide legends like Friedrich Hayek (famously the author of The Road to Serfdom) and “free markets, monetarism and minimal government intervention” Milton Friedman, whom Lai was later to befriend.
Lai even, as he grows ever richer after moving into the retail sector with his Giordano brand – in a period of his life that the Clifford elides as if it were a cocktail evening gone somewhat astray – starts to enjoy the kinds of extravagances suggestive of roadsigns and guideposts to sanity disappearing in a trail of dust:
A chauffeured gold Rolls-Royce ferried him into town. Lai had a miniature zoo that included peacocks, a flying fox, deer, a monkey, and a pet bear who liked to drink cream soda. Once, Lai wrestled with the bear as it tried to escape, and got scratched up in the process … He invited friends over to take saunas and cold plunges and smoke weed as they looked across the majestic harbor toward the skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island.
On that note – and no judgement, other than to point out that it was and still is highly illegal in Hong Kong – quite a lot of weed smoking goes on in Lai’s chase-the-money heyday. But ultimately he would restlessly begin seeking more from life than spliffs, peacocks and ice-cream-soda-guzzling pet bears.
Firstly, in what turned out to be a brilliant career move, Lai moved from manufacturing sweaters for the US mass market to retailing his own garments via the Giordano brand name – a name inspired by an Italian restaurant where he ate a pizza in New York. In the process, Lai revolutionized retail fashion.
To avoid getting stuck with excess stock in slow-moving colors, he made everything in white and dyed the items when orders came in. This inverted the traditional clothes-making method of using dyed fabric to make clothes. It also dramatically reduced the amount of unsold clothes. If lime-green was selling and orange wasn’t, Giordano would dye a lot of lime-green clothes—and avoid getting stuck with orange ones. “Simplicity became the theme. Every day I ask myself, “Can I make it simpler, can I make it cheaper, can I make it better?”
Lai had, as Clifford puts it, “pioneered fast fashion” and was even courted with a 30% share of a Japanese fast-fashion startup called Uniqlo. Lai, who had an aversion to partnerships, turned down the offer, and the Uniqlo founder, Tadashi Yanai, went on to become one of Japan’s richest men.
But these were busy times, change was in the air and something was afoot in China.
That something was to evolve over the early months of 1989 into what soon became simply known as Tiananmen – the Gate of Heavenly Peace, as the grand square in the heart of imperial Beijing is called.
The students protesting in Tiananmen Square inspired Lai. In his early years, he had not enjoyed the luxury of engaging in politics. Politics in China had shattered his family and destroyed his childhood. Lai felt something between embarrassment and shame when he thought of his homeland. He had turned his back on China in the 1960s and 1970s as he worked to get ahead in Hong Kong. Hong Kong people rallied in support of Beijing’s protesters. In 1988, a crowd of a few thousand people was considered a large pro-democracy rally. In May 1989, a million people marched to government headquarters on Hong Kong Island; pro-communist groups walked alongside pro-democracy ones. The colony witnessed a spring of unprecedented democratic ferment. Lai looked for a way to demonstrate his sympathy. He boosted Giordano’s edgy reputation and the pro-democracy movement’s coffers by raising $122,000 from the sale of more than 23,000 T-shirts.
Clifford has a lot to say about what happened in the years that followed: how Lai ventured from fast fashion to “fast news,” first.
In 1990, Lai launched “Next” – “a weekly magazine advocating for free markets and democracy alongside gossip and business news.” That in turn, years later, led to the founding of the daily Apple newspaper, first in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan. But the author clearly sees the events of June 4, 1989, in Beijing as the catalyst for the truly profound changes in Lai’s world, writing:
“I didn’t feel anything about China until Tiananmen Square happened. Suddenly it was like my mother was calling me in the darkness of the night and my heart opened up” … Something changed inside Lai during those fateful, emotionally charged months in the spring of 1989. The route China charted after the killings would disappoint the hopes of many, both in Hong Kong and in China itself. Lai’s own path would, from then on, be one that publicly and defiantly put him in opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.
“Defiant” is the right word. In the years following the Tiananmen Square massacre, Lai was far from being a dissident in any conventional sense of the word. He was a rich businessman who, unusually, refused to be cowed by Beijing’s bluster and bullying.
When Premier Li Peng, Deng Xiaoping’s “chief hatchet man in carrying out the Tiananmen massacre, earning the premier infamy as ‘the butcher of Beijing’” visited Europe in 1994, Lai also happened to be in Europe.
The coincidence prompted Lai to write a column for his own Next Magazine that would make history and evoke the permanent visceral ire of the CCP.
… He derided the Chinese premier as “a national humiliation.” He criticized the barbarism, corruption, and decay of the Chinese Communist Party and pointed out that the party used people merely as tools, means to an end, rather seeing the worth and dignity of each individual. Lai touched on the themes of information and democracy, telling Li [Peng] that his “slave-master’s face is a laughingstock in today’s information-informed egalitarian world.” He closed his column with an emphatic throwdown to the premier: “I want to tell you that not only are you a bastard, you are also a bastard with zero IQ.” Literally, he called the premier a gui dan, or turtle egg, an everyday curse implying that the object of the curse, like a turtle, doesn’t know who his parents are.
Actually, Lai used the colloquial Chinese expression wáng bā dàn 王八蛋 (not guī dàn) – best thought of as “bastard” or “son of a bitch” multiplied by 10 in insult quotient. But his phrasing is far less important than the fact he had thrown down the gauntlet to Beijing and effectively made himself an extremely high-profile enemy of the state, as opposed to a mischievous tycoon with a multimedia megaphone.
Lai did later defend his column – as if a defense counts in Beijing – but even this column was another double-down on his disgust for China’s rulers:
“I will fight for freedom, I will not give up anticommunism, I will never give up my dignity as a human being, never will.”
They were words that were to become Lai’s credo – and to his credit he saw them through to jail, where he remains.
But in the meantime, he was still under siege as a businessman, his Giordano retail interests harried by the Chinese authorities, his media interests struggling to find printers and moneyed advertising partners. But the Apple Daily was going ahead anyway, and his rationale for the name is an early hint of the Catholicism that he was to later lean on when his world came crashing down.
Lai had “dubbed his newspaper Apple Daily, thinking of the Garden of Eden,” writes Clifford, elaborating in Lai’s words:
“Eve ate the apple,” the fruit of knowledge. “Without the apple there would be no news.” “One night after prayer,” he told Father Robert Sirico, “the idea came to me to call it ‘Apple’ because I thought if Eve did not bite the apple we would still be in heaven, there’s no need for a newspaper.”
The result was no earnest, dissident publication focused on the inequities of Hong Kong’s giant across the border. Rather, it was a frequently scurrilous celebration of Hong Kong – and best, once again, described as “defiant.”
Apple Daily was famous for its take-no-prisoners, tabloid-style approach. It was a broadsheet newspaper in size, but it had a tabloid’s scurrilous bent. “I always thought of Next as the sword and then Apple Daily was the bulldozer that drove it home,” observes Mark Simon, who served as the paper’s general manager from 2004 to 2006.
Lai bears comparison with William Randolph Hearst. As press barons, both combined sensationalism with hard-hitting reporting, banner headlines, and provocative editorial cartoons. Technology allowed Lai to take sensational journalism further than Hearst had been able to, with full-color photos of everything: car crashes, women giving birth on the street, and politicians slipping into hotels with their mistresses. Brain splatter, amputated limbs, corpses, and car crashes. Apple Daily showed them all in graphic color photos. Where Hearst pushed Americans to fight for an overseas empire, beating the drums of war during the Spanish-American War—a conflict that resulted in the United States acquiring the Philippines and Puerto Rico—Lai promoted democracy in Hong Kong. “He had everything,” says Crovitz. “Editorials that could have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, gossip that went well beyond People magazine, political coverage that was quite sophisticated, and pictures of actresses. He cared about what Hong Kong people wanted to read. He had a big advantage as a media innovator, which is that he didn’t grow up in the industry, so he could do whatever he wanted.”
But, as was the case in 1989 with Tiananmen, another sea change was upon Lai – and all of Hong Kong: this time in the form of a new national security law, which pro-Beijing politicians tried to push through in 2003.
Under the terms of the so-called one country, two systems “negotiated” by Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher, China had pledged to preserve Hong Kong’s unique legal, social and business culture when the former British colony was handed over in 1997. Fifty years Beijing said it would give Hong Kong to enjoy its capitalist system – not to mention countless freedoms absent in China’s mainland cities.
Lai is said to have spent some US$1 million of his own money in catalyzing the protests that made the 2003 push to turn Hong Kong’s legal system on its head – bringing up to 1 million people to the streets and eventually forcing the then chief executive to resign two years early.
But Lai, along with all the Hongkongers who took to the streets, had mostly just bought themselves time. As Clifford later writes:
On June 30, 2020, China’s National People’s Congress illegally bypassed the Hong Kong legislature and imposed a sweeping National Security Law that outlawed dissent and ended the city’s freedom. The bill outlawed terrorism, subversion, secession, or collusion with a foreign government. Any criticism of the government could breach the vague new rules. Maximum penalty: life imprisonment. The law did away with jury trials, left defendants at the mercy of handpicked judges, and would ultimately be used to deny Lai his choice of lawyer. Contact with a foreign government that called for more democracy or for sanctions against Hong Kong officials was deemed to be “collusion” with foreigners and could result in conviction. The government argued, before its secretly chosen judges, that popular slogans such as “Revolution of our times” constituted secession. The law criminalized calls for democracy.
Lai quickly became one of the new law’s first targets.
On Monday, August 10, 2020, six weeks after the imposition of the new law, Lai was escorted from his home, hands handcuffed behind his back and “manhandled by the arresting officers, who bundled him into a police vehicle and drove him the ten miles to Apple Daily offices in Tseung Kwan O’s industrial park.”
Two hundred and fifty armed police had raided the building earlier that morning. They filed through the lobby, past the busts of Lai’s freedom heroes that graced the entrance—John Cowperthwaite, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. They marched up the long curving stairs from the lobby to the third-floor newsroom.
Time ran out for Lai in December 2020. On December 3, a judge ordered that his bail be revoked … Lai managed to win a short reprieve over Christmas week when a judge granted bail on December 23, though Lai remained under house arrest … On December 27, he sent a WhatsApp message to colleagues: “I’m fucked. Delete everything.”
Since his arrest four years ago, Lai has remained in prison, often in solitary confinement. He had no shortage of opportunities to escape the arm of the law before his arrest; he had no shortage of funds to support himself or of properties abroad to retreat to, but true to his word he took his Hong Kong treatment on the chin. Clifford quotes an imprisoned Lai as saying:
A young prison guard asked me, when no one was around: “Why didn’t you leave before they arrested you, for surely everybody knew that it was coming to you?” “No, I could not leave, otherwise I could not raise my head and walk tall again. I must face the consequences of my actions, just or unjust. It is also a way to uphold the dignity of Hong Kong people, as one of the leaders for the fight of freedom.
It is this latter “prison years” section of the book, which it has to be admitted is something of a slog to get through, that undoubtedly led The New York Times to call The Troublemaker …
… Hagiography in the word’s original sense: Though it does not entirely overlook Lai’s warts, it ultimately presents its subject as a kind of living saint.
There is no denying that the book belabors the “sacrifices” of Lai, a convert, late in life, to Catholicism …
Lai understands that his task is very simple: He must survive with dignity. He must remain mentally and spiritually free, and remain true to his principles. His days have the structure and simplicity of a Benedictine monk. He wakes early; he spends his day reading, meditating, and drawing, in addition to performing mandatory prison labor.
But the first three-quarters of the read make it worthwhile – and it opens up space for thought, at least in the case of this reader, as to just what is Jimmy Lai? After all, China has produced no other “troublemaker” like him.
He’s an incarcerated former billionaire, castigating himself for disappointing the Lord for killing the cockroaches that disturb his nights. He’s a reformed practical businessman who was ever sucking up the fumes of the CCP’s coming collapse, a man who was actually surprised when Xi Jinping won his third term, a man who naively believes that something as malevolent as the CCP simply has no hope of surviving, despite a lifetime of being proved wrong.
For anyone who is more pragmatic or simply knows the CCP for what it is, there are no surprises in The Troublemaker: only perhaps that Hong Kong and Jimmy Lai got away with simply being themselves – whatever exactly that is (exuberant in spirit and spending?) – for as long as they did.
A moment of housekeeping (again): After something of a gap since the last ChinaDiction, I have decided that there is now so much SubStack news and commentary on China – much of it very good – that ChinaDiction will continue mostly as long-form book reviews that allow space for commentary on China and the greater sinosphere. Thanks for your continued support.