Jimmy Lai won’t back down

Jimmy Lai, photographed in his Hong Kong home.

At 3:30 a.m. on a chill January morning, Hong Kong media magnate Jimmy Lai was awakened by a housemaid. Police were at the door of his British-colonial-era mansion. “I thought they had come in the middle of the night to arrest me,” Lai, a former child sweatshop worker, says matter-of-factly later that day, sipping tea in a sitting room decorated with brilliantly colored paintings by Chinese-American artist Walasse Ting.
Lai’s assumption was hardly far-fetched, given his front-line role when pro-democracy protesters seized control of much of Hong Kong’s central business district for almost three months late last year. On this predawn visit, however, the cops had other matters in mind. Unbeknownst to the slumbering Lai, arsonists had attacked his home, hurling a Molotov cocktail that exploded spectacularly against the steel-barred front gate. Unfazed, Lai delegated the task of meeting police to an assistant, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
Such are the life and times of Hong Kong’s most combative tycoon and owner of its feistiest media outlets, Bloomberg Markets reports in its May 2015 issue. And such is the fearless disdain he shows for his foes, be they China’s all-powerful Communist leaders, bomb-throwing triad gangsters currying favor with Beijing, or the authors of a fake obituary published last year in a rival newspaper (to which Lai, now 66, riposted in a video, “Sorry to disappoint you”).
Beginning in September, tens of thousands of protesters occupied downtown streets for 79 days. It was the biggest threat to the Chinese Politburo’s control since it regained sovereignty of the former British colony in 1997. The shock troops were mainly students, but Lai’s role was pivotal.
His donations have long funded pro-democracy groups. During the occupation, his tall, burly frame was an imposing presence almost every day, braving tear gas, pepper spray, and, on one occasion, pigs’ entrails hurled by unidentified men. And his raucous tabloid Apple Daily is the loudest media voice of anti-Beijing protest. “When it comes to media influence, Rupert Murdoch is a toddler compared to Jimmy,” says Robert Chow, co-founder of the pro-Beijing Silent Majority for Hong Kong. “While Murdoch tries to control things from the shadows, Jimmy is right out there. He’s the brains behind it all.” Martin Lee, a co-founder of the main opposition Democratic Party, says, “Jimmy Lai is indispensable to the democracy movement in Hong Kong.”
Lai sees things differently. “It’s a movement initiated by the people,” he says. “Seeing these kids gives you great hope,” he says of the student protesters. “There’s no leadership, and that makes it very powerful. It is spontaneous, God-sent.”
Lai and the pro-democracy movement could do with some divine intervention. Their central demand is the right to freely elect Hong Kong’s leader, known as the chief executive, in 2017. Chinese President Xi Jinping is insisting on having the candidates vetted first to ensure they are pro-Beijing. The Chinese plan will have to be approved by a two-thirds majority of the city’s quasi-democratic legislature in a vote likely to be held by the end of July, and minority groups financially backed by Lai may well be able to muster enough votes to block it. Should that happen, Xi’s government has said the next chief executive will be selected just as the previous three were—by a Beijing-anointed committee of just 1,200 people. Announcing final details of the Chinese plan yesterday, the Hong Kong government confirmed that the Occupy Central protesters failed to win any significant concessions. “They have lost in the short term, and that’s unfortunate,” says Douglas Paal, a vice president of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former adviser on Asia to U.S. President George H.W. Bush.
However, shock waves from the occupation continue to reverberate around Zhongnanhai, the walled compound abutting Beijing’s Forbidden City where Xi is establishing himself as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. By crushing democratic aspirations, Xi could endanger Hong Kong’s role as China’s international financial center—a position it holds in large part because of its existing freedoms, says Kerry Brown, head of the University of Sydney’s China Studies Center. “Hong Kong is still incredibly important as the primary portal for capital flows in and out of China,” Brown, a former senior British diplomat, says. “Beijing may have won in the short term, but in the long term it cannot win if it wants to preserve Hong Kong as the distinctive place it is.” In a city that can seem all-business and money obsessed, Lai has helped to politicize an emerging generation of Hong Kong’s brightest and push them to challenge Beijing’s idea of democracy. “The young people in Hong Kong have a very different value system, and they are prepared to fight for it,” he says. “Democracy, freedom of information is like air to them. If they can’t have it, they can’t breathe.”
Many in the business community agree. “Hong Kong’s core values are absolutely critical to its success,” says Peter Levesque, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. “This is a defining moment. Is Hong Kong committed to maintaining the characteristics that have made it so successful? Or is it destined to become just any other city in China?”
In 1994, Lai called China’s then premier, Li Peng, a “turtle’s egg,” Chinese slang for “bastard.”
The struggle for Hong Kong’s future is being closely watched by foreign investors whose enthusiasm for Hong Kong shares has made the USD5.03 trillion stock exchange the world’s third largest by market value. While the stock market lost only 1.6 percent during the protest compared with a 3.4 percent decline in the MSCI World Index, the broader economy took a hit. Growth slowed to 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter from 1.4 percent in the previous three months.
The protests aren’t going away, says David Webb, a Hong Kong–based investor and shareholder activist who supported them. “The government will have to expect, so long as it lacks legitimacy, to face more challenges to its authority and possibly more-organized ones,” he says.
While Hong Kong was never a democracy under Britain, it did enjoy free speech and an independent legal system. Under an agreement known as “one country, two systems,” China guaranteed those freedoms would be retained for 50 years from 1997, when the colony returned to Chinese sovereignty. Eighteen years later, some appear under threat—in part because of efforts to muzzle Lai. While successive Chinese governments have left the former’s legal system intact, Hong Kong plunged from 12th place in 2002 to 61st in 2014 on the World Press Freedom Index of 180 countries compiled by Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.
Lai and his allies are riding a wave of protest that isn’t only about freedom. Hong Kong is one of the world’s most unequal societies. Ten of the world’s 200 wealthiest individuals live within the 1,104-square- kilometer enclave, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In a city that has more Rolls-Royces per capita than any other, multibillionaires live practically cheek by jowl with old people who live in cages—bunks stacked on top of one another in tenement rooms, separated only by metal bars. Government figures show that more than one in seven Hong Kongers lives in poverty and half earn less than $1,700 a month in a city with the world’s highest property prices.
So far, Lai has survived China’s attempts to silence him. “It comforts me that Jimmy is there,” says Victor Shih, a Hong Kong–born Harvard Ph.D. and China scholar at the University of California at San Diego. If Lai were somehow sidelined, that would be a sign that the status Hong Kong enjoys under “one country, two systems” is doomed, Shih says: “He’s the canary in the coal mine.” William Mellor, Bloomberg