Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy media tycoon in Hong Kong on trial starting Monday for crimes against national security, is one of Hong Kong's most famous dissidents and one of Beijing's old pet peeves.
He is the first to be accused of “colluding with foreign forces” under the national security law that Beijing imposed in 2020, a year after major pro-democracy protests.
A “born rebel”
Billionaire Jimmy Lai, who likes to portray himself as a “troublemaker,” has long supported the democracy movement in Hong Kong, which was suppressed in 2019.
He was born in mainland China and came illegally to Hong Kong at the age of 12, where he worked in sweatshops before founding what would become the international textile empire Giordano in 1981.
Mr. Lai founded his first publication, highly critical of the Chinese apparatus, shortly after Chinese tanks were sent to Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 to crush pro-democracy demonstrations.
Its two main titles, the Apple Daily and the digital-only magazine Next, were hugely popular in Hong Kong, mixing sensationalism with hard-hitting political reporting.
They were also among the rare publications to openly side with the major democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019. This led to Jimmy Lai being labeled a “traitor” by Chinese state media.
Shortly before his arrest in 2020, when asked by AFP why he did not enjoy his fortune peacefully without making noise like so many Hong Kong tycoons, Mr Lai replied: “Maybe I am a born rebellious person, maybe I am someone who is apart from money it must give my life a lot of meaning.”
The “death blow for Hong Kong”
The tycoon added that Beijing's national security law would “spell the death knell for Hong Kong.”
He was first arrested in August 2020 during a raid on Apple Daily.
In December 2020, a judge granted him bail of 10 million Hong Kong dollars (US$1.7 million), but a week later, Hong Kong's highest court ordered his return to prison, where he has been held since then, awaiting trial waiting, which begins on Monday.
He is, according to his son Sébastien Lai, “the oldest political prisoner in Hong Kong.”
His foreign lawyer lodged an objection
Since Mr. Lai's release on bail was revoked, different and stricter rules apply to national security cases. This decision set a precedent and impacted dozens of subsequent cases.
To defend himself at his trial, Mr Lai had chosen Tim Owen, a prominent British lawyer and human rights specialist, but Beijing granted the Hong Kong leader new powers to challenge foreign lawyers in security-related cases.
The city's pro-Beijing parliament went a step further in May, passing laws requiring foreign lawyers to have special permission to intervene in such cases.
That dispute will lead to a separate hearing in Mr. Lai's trial next year.