On the morning of Aug. 10, 2020, scores of armed police arrived at the headquarters of Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy newspapers. They rifled through the offices, hunting for evidence of treason, and frog-marched the paper’s billionaire publisher, Jimmy Lai, through his own third-floor newsroom. Lai soon faced charges under a new security law of colluding with foreign powers. A few months later, Mark L. Clifford writes in “The Troublemaker,” a brisk account of Lai’s life and work, the gravity of his predicament began to set in, and Lai sent a laconic WhatsApp message to his associates: “Delete everything.”
Lai has pleaded not guilty, testifying at his trial this past fall that he was simply trying to carry “a torch to the reality” of Hong Kong’s mood. His newspaper had offered robust support for the protesters in the city’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, which had decried the way Beijing was tightening its grip on the territory after taking control from the United Kingdom in 1997.
Since his arrest four years ago, Lai has remained in prison, often in solitary confinement. Although President-elect Trump has boasted that it will be “easy” for him to free Lai, most observers are less sanguine. Lai himself made the decision to remain in Hong Kong rather than to try to flee, knowing that he could well spend the rest of his life in a prison cell. “I called my people to fight,” Lai explained to the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky shortly before his arrest. “I can’t let them down.”
“The Troublemaker” is a 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. Clifford is a former Hong Kong newspaper editor as well as a human rights advocate who served on the board of one of Lai’s companies, and he emphasizes Lai’s self-sacrifice and courage in his defense of democracy and economic freedom. Lai’s story, Clifford writes, ultimately reveals “a man who rises above the physical prison to find himself mentally freer than ever.”
Lai’s journey — from an impoverished childhood in China’s southern Guangdong province during the Chinese civil war era to becoming one of Hong Kong’s richest men — is a genuinely gripping yarn. Mao’s revolution in 1949 upended his family life. Lai recalls watching Communist officials force his mother to kneel on broken glass. Food was so scarce that she intentionally burned rice at the forced labor site where she was a cook so that she could bring it home to feed her children. In the worst days, Lai recalls dining on grilled field mice. At age 6, he would forage for cigarette butts, remove the tobacco dregs and sell the re-rolled product for a meager profit. His distraught father tried to hang himself in the same room where his young son was resting.
At 12, Lai decided to steal away to Hong Kong. He worked in factories and lost a fingertip. Dominated by the British since the 19th century, the colony was suffused with Anglo-European culture. “I noticed that everybody who made it spoke English,” Lai recalled. He listened intently to Voice of America and browsed the dictionary in his free time.
Lai eventually came to run his own factory and hustled amid the American department store buyers looking for low-cost suppliers, making his early fortune in fast fashion. He became an evangelist for what he called “Western culture and values and institutions,” handing out copies of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” and eventually befriending the classical-liberal economist Milton Friedman.
Although Clifford does not dwell on it, Lai also began to display some of the uglier characteristics of unbridled capitalism. A few years after founding his first retail chain he was being driven around in a golden Rolls-Royce and keeping a private zoo filled with, Clifford writes, “peacocks, a flying fox, deer, a monkey and a pet bear who liked to drink cream soda.”
Lai’s journalism, too, was marked by a kind of prurient excess. At the publications he started — Next magazine and the tabloid Apple Daily — he bought his paparazzi scooters, the better to arrive at car crashes while the bodies were still warm, and his paper featured detailed, user-friendly reviews of Hong Kong’s bustling prostitution scene.
Yet after Beijing’s 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, Lai discovered a new sense of mission. “I didn’t feel anything about China until Tiananmen Square happened,” Lai told an interviewer. “Suddenly it was like my mother was calling me in the darkness of the night and my heart opened up.” Lai built a network of relationships with pro-democracy activists and Western power players. By the time the Umbrella Movement erupted, Lai was out on the streets with the other protesters, holding court from a lawn chair by a KFC restaurant.
Despite Lai’s evident courage and resourcefulness, there is something slightly unsatisfying about Clifford’s portrayal of him as a martyr for capitalism and the Western way. We now know all too well that the kind of free-market fundamentalism that Lai espouses can lead to the inequality that fuels xenophobic nationalism. The Western world itself is now led by a man who is starting to use lawsuits and intimidation to cow the press. Among the unexpected victims in Clifford’s tale are the “Western values” for which Lai has sacrificed so much.
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