You are listening to part two of a Barefoot Lawyer Reports on China interview with Mark Clifford, President of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, conducted by Dr. William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights. To listen to the other parts in this series, please check the links in the description.
Mark Clifford: At that point, the Chinese, the CCP, Xi Jinping, said, “Whoa, we have lost Hong Kong. We have tried everything. We’ve used water cannons, tear gas, you know, beatings, arrests. Over 10,000 people arrested in that period on political charges. And still — and we’ve tried all sorts of fear mongering tactics, we’ve threatened to send in tanks over the border from Shenzhen, you know, effectively threatening another Tiananmen style massacre — and nothing has worked. We’ve lost the people of Hong Kong.”
Now in an open society, not like it, but the government would say, “Okay, we got to either step down, let somebody else try, or negotiate with the opposition.”
And China said no. Even before COVID started, Xi Jinping, in December… So right after those elections, when it could have been a breathing period, a cooling off period, I mean, the kind of circuit breaker function that elections can provide; instead, Xi Jinping sends in two hard-line people, notably a guy named Shabao Long, whose previous job, he’d come out of retirement, but his last job had literally been smashing churches in Zhejiang Province, one of the most Christian provinces in China.
He sent in hard-line henchmen, and that was a signal to Hong Kong that he was going to crack down. Fortunately for Xi Jinping, COVID came along and made it… It’s almost like he would have had to invent it if it didn’t exist.
William Saunders: Like the Wuhan Laboratories.
M: Yeah, so I, you know… Yeah. Anyway, so that was a perfect excuse, you know, social distancing, can’t have more than four people, you know, etc. And so that was the reason that they decided to prohibit the 2020 commemoration of Tiananmen. There were still small scale demonstrations, but that really took the wind out of the sails of the protest movement.
W: Yeah, the iconic moment was, I think, well, one of the iconic moments, anyway, was when they closed Apple Daily. And Apple Daily was Jimmy’s newspaper. It was on the street every day.
M: Let me walk you through a little of that because the timing on that’s very interesting. So the National Security Law, which as I said, effectively criminalized dissent, came into effect at like, at 11 o’ clock at night on June 30, 2020. And it was just imposed on Hong Kong, completely illegal.
Beijing broke all its promises to have the Hong Kong People and the Hong Kong legislature enact its own laws. As a matter of fact, the chief executive of Hong Kong herself did not see the law until earlier the same day when it was promulgated. But nobody really knew how serious it was going to be.
I mean, there were still demonstrations, the COVID restrictions notwithstanding. And about six weeks later, we got a sense of how serious it was going to be when the police came into Jimmy’s house, Jimmy Lai’s house, early in the morning, I think about 7:30 or so in the morning on August 10th, Monday, August 10th.
And… He’d been arrested before, but he’d always been very polite. Officers would show up, if he was exercising, “You could take a shower, take your time, just come with us, come down.” It was kind of a routine thing as a civil… Somebody who’s involved in civil disobedience.
But this was different. On August 10, 2020, they handcuffed him. Handcuffed, you know, handcuffed him, the hands behind his back; bundled him, despite all the COVID restrictions. Somehow the cops were all around manhandling him. There were a lot of… They alerted all the press, all the photographers there.
Everybody’s crowded in for the photo op, you know, so, yeah, what about these COVID restrictions? I mean, it’s kind of a joke. But then they perp walk him, they drive him down to the office, to the Apple Daily — huge headquarters. We had around 1,000 people. I was on the board of directors, so I was quite involved in this.
Turns out, in fact, I was the only member of the board of directors in Hong Kong not in police custody on that day, because they took in Jimmy, they took in our CEO, they took in our COO and a number of other people, including two of Jimmy’s sons, who still have charges pending over them, even though they have nothing to do with Jimmy’s political stuff.
Very intense. Most of the people were let out within 24 hours or so. Jimmy was kept, I think, for about two and a half days or so. He came out, triumphant return. Newspaper prints more copies than ever. The share price goes up because people wanted to, in Hong Kong, wanted to show their support and solidarity with Apple and with Jimmy.
I mean, it was really quite a time. And Jimmy and I were doing a series of weekly conversations, live streams. After that arrest, we had 200,000 people watching us. So, you know, the people of Hong Kong were really behind Apple and everybody understood what the stakes were.
And there were other people doing things in July. A few weeks before that first arrest, there was an election primary, an unofficial election primary where all the pro-democracy parties, for the first time ever decided they’d try to winnow down the candidates so they’d have the strongest possible slate to face off against the pro Beijing people.
I mean, isn’t this how politics work? Isn’t this what you’d like people to do, to be involved with… non-violently with a due legislative process working towards a better society? Well, a couple weeks — actually, a couple of months later, it was actually on January 6, 2021, a day that was pretty active here in America as well.
But a few hours before that, Hong Kong police went in and arrested 75 people who were involved with this election primary. And in fact, just in late November, 45 of them were sentenced. I mean, they’ve all been held for, or pretty much all of them have been held for four years.
So the pressure was increasing on Next and on Jimmy and on Apple. And in December that year, December 2020, his bail was revoked. He went into prison. He got out for a few days over Christmas that year, he was basically under house arrest. And then December 31, 2020, he was put into prison, where he’s been ever since.
The newspaper was still running, but in, I think… I don’t know what they thought. I think authorities thought we would just cave in or crumble. But I think the mood in the newsroom and certainly on the board of directors, was, “We’re going to go as long as we can go.”
And Jimmy’s assets were frozen while he was in jail, anything to do with the newspaper. Then a couple weeks later, we as directors got a letter informing us that, although there was no court order, that the secretary for security, a man named John Lee, who’s now the head of Hong Kong, he thought we’d broken the law, so he was just going to freeze our bank accounts.
So you think about this. This is supposed to be a business center that has rule of law, and a secretary of security can wake up one day and decide, you know, he doesn’t like the way you look, doesn’t like what you’re writing, just doesn’t like things. Maybe he’s just got a stomach ache.
But anyway, he goes after somebody he doesn’t like. He shut our bank accounts down. He told banks that they couldn’t process payments. We had almost 600,000 digital subscribers. We were actually doing a really successful job of making the switch from print to digital. Those were shut off overnight because he told the banks, “You bankers are going to jail if you give these guys a penny.”
We couldn’t pay the electricity bill, we couldn’t pay the staff. We had to let almost 1,000 people go. And the last editions came off on June 24, 2021. We printed a million copies and they were sold in hours before noontime that day. It’s an incredible story, but it was the end of an era.
People depended on Apple for so much in Hong Kong. To act as a watchdog, to look at courts, to look at police, to look at corruption, to look at business. All gone.
W: Yeah, it’s such a… I just hope everybody can, can kind of try to think back and recapture: Hong Kong was about freedom, it was about business. And so it was making money, and China was benefiting from that. And it was… but it had freedom.
So the communists, they don’t care if they kill the goose who lays the golden egg. If the goose says something they don’t like, they’re going to kill it.
M: I think we all thought they were more pragmatic. We thought that socialism with Chinese characteristics meant that you could let one little golden goose off in a far-off corner of the kingdom do its thing. But even that proved too much.
W: Yeah, it’s amazing. And that story, in a certain sense, would not be forgotten. But it’s kept in the forefront of our thoughts by Jimmy Lai’s trial and the fact that there’s just… There’s, you know, from a purely kind of pragmatic point of view, there’s no reason for him to be in jail in the sense that he could, with no trouble, have gotten away, but he wouldn’t do it.
M: Any afternoon he could have just, or any morning, he could have just gone to the airport. I mean, he had the money, he could get a private plane, but there were hundreds of flights every day going out of Hong Kong. He has houses in Kyoto, Taipei, London, Paris, maybe more, I don’t know.
He said, “I’m not leaving.” He told… I mean, many people urged him to leave. I mean, I wouldn’t dare, but many people did. And his reaction to one of them was, “I would rather be hanging dead from a lamp post in Central, a lamp post in central Hong Kong, than to give the communists the satisfaction of saying that I ran away.”
He’s not a guy who runs. He is a tough guy. And I think we need to think about where he came from. He came to Hong Kong as a 12 and a half year old stowaway who escaped famine in China. I mean, he left during the Great Leap Forward when something like 45 million people — think about that — 45 million people were dying from the worst famine in history. A politically induced famine, a famine caused by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party.
He left that. What did he find in Hong Kong the first morning he woke up? I mean, he went to his aunt and uncle’s house.
They lived in a shack that was so small, there wasn’t even room for him to sleep on the floor. So they found a factory that would take him in. He slept on the table. He started working at the factory. But that first morning there, he’s described it many times.
He woke up, he smelled the congee, the rice porridge, smelled the warm bread and the food. And this is a guy… in China, he was so happy if he found a field mouse and grilled it. That was a great delicacy for him. So there’s a guy that knew hunger in China, and he found freedom in Hong Kong.
First it was the freedom to eat, and then 15 years later, he’s working in a glove factory. He’s working in a sweatshop as a child laborer, really, a teenager. Not even a teenager; 12 and a half when he came and worked from day one. So he’s got the freedom to make his own money.
Then he finds the freedom to start a business. He becomes one of the most successful… He’s described it as the largest sweater manufacturer in Hong Kong, if not in Asia. And he’s selling to the Limited and JCPenney and Kmart and, you know, big companies. And I’ve talked to people who knew him back in the 70s. Even then, this guy was shaking up the garment industry, got a little bored with that.
Started a fast fashion clothing company so successful that the head of Uniqlo, what became Uniqlo, the huge Japanese fast fashion giant, came down to Hong Kong to learn from Jimmy. He gets bored, a little bored with that. He was actually thinking of going into fast food. When Tiananmen happened, he was so…
Just so overcome with emotion, I think so impressed with what the students were doing that he started selling T-shirts to raise money for the students in Tiananmen. And he didn’t just have a bunch of words on the T-shirts. He put graphic images of some of the student leaders and sent money and tents and other equipment supplies up to Beijing.
And I think he, like so many millions of other people, especially in Hong Kong, was just heartbroken by the massacre that happened in Beijing in 1989. So he says, “Okay, I’m not going to…” He was going to go into fast food. And he said, “No, I’ll just go into media. I’ll start a magazine. I think that openness is the way to go.”
And remember, a few months later, the Berlin Wall falls, and then the Soviet communism collapses. And he’s like, “Hey, I’m writing. I’m giving people information, transparency. That’s about choice. It’s freedom to consume media, freedom to know things, freedom to push for more freedom.”
And that’s when he started the newspaper and the magazines, as the Chinese were preparing to take over Hong Kong. He knew what he was doing. He knew the risks he was running. And he could have run away during any of those 30 years. He could have run away, and he didn’t.
The Center for Human Rights is hosting a student essay contest with a grand prize of $4,000. To learn more, please visit our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.