You are listening to part one 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.
William Saunders: Welcome to another edition of the Barefoot Lawyer Podcast. The Barefoot Lawyer, of course, is Chen Guangcheng; I’m William Saunders. I’m the director of the Center for Human Rights at Catholic University here in Washington, D.C., and today I’m interviewing Mark Clifford. We want to talk about Jimmy Lai, and I think most people listening to this podcast have heard of Jimmy Lai, but just tell us who he is and what’s happening with him at the moment, Mark.
Mark Clifford: Sure. Well, Jimmy Lai is an incredibly successful businessman — or he was an incredibly successful businessman — in Hong Kong who is now on trial for something that could see him put in prison for life. He’s a media owner, he’s an outspoken proponent of freedom. He’s a deep, deep, devout Catholic, as is his wife, Teresa, and he’s a man who’s trying to learn how to live freely while he’s in jail.
We’re speaking in early December 2024, and Jimmy’s been in jail for more than 1,400 days, almost all of that in solitary confinement. I mean, think about that: 1,400 days where for 23 hours and 10 minutes each day you are alone in your cell without any natural light, might get out for 15 minutes of fresh air, exercise a day, and that’s it.
And he’s amazing. He’s now testifying in his National Security Law case, and he sounds as robust in his defense of human rights, what he calls universal values, as he ever has. We don’t have any audio from the court, but I read the words, and it’s the Jimmy I know, and he’s trying, with the help of his Catholic faith and his wife Teresa, he’s living as a free man.
He knows that only Xi Jinping, the leader of China, can decide when he’s free physically, but that he can live spiritually, mentally, as a free man. And that’s what he’s trying to do. And it seems that he’s doing it successfully.
W: I mean, it’s an incredible drama. And I hope people listen to the podcast. This is happening right now in early December. This is [an] incredible drama. It makes me think also, when you said he talks about universal values, that’s the way Chen Guangcheng, if we ask him about, he doesn’t usually say human rights, but he says “universal values,” and then he’ll say human rights, the rule of law, constitutional democracy.
But it’s that idea of universal values. And it’s very important, everybody listening. I mean, it unites you, regardless of your race or your geographic location or anything else, these universal values, one of which is the dignity of the human person.
So Jimmy’s standing up for that, as you said, he’s on trial now, Mark. But he was supposed to be on trial, I think, in the spring, but as I recall, it got continued and he’s been brought back.
M: Well, they’ve had him in custody for four years. The National Security Law that he’s being tried under has penalties of 10 years to life. He’s 76 years old and even 10 years is tantamount to a life sentence. They keep delaying the trial. They’ve also convicted him on a number of bogus charges.
Let’s see, one was incitement to riot. And what he did was attend a… well, he went to Victoria park, the site of Tiananmen massacre commemorations every June 4th in 2020 during the COVID epidemic. And they had prohibited a commemoration. He stepped out of his car, he lit a candle in commemoration, he said a prayer, he stayed 15 minutes.
He didn’t talk to the media, he didn’t talk to anyone. He got back in his car. So for that he was convicted of incitement to riot. He’s now serving a five year, nine month sentence on bogus fraud charges that relate to a disputed sublease. This has never been a criminal charge in Hong Kong before.
Wow, somehow magically it becomes a criminal charge for Jimmy Lai to try to confuse people that he’s some kind of fraudster or something. It’s a joke. It would be laughable if it weren’t this man’s life. And, as you say, they just keep delaying these trials. Under the basic law, which is the mini constitution that the Chinese themselves wrote and imposed on Hong Kong, Jimmy should have the right to trial by jury.
No, he’s got three handpicked judges, and they are acting more like prosecutors than like judges. I want to get to this issue of universal values that you talked about at the beginning of your question. It’s really interesting that Chen Guangcheng mentions that because Jimmy always talks about universal values.
I’ve almost never heard him mention human rights and I’ve known him 30-plus years. Interestingly, in his trial this week, in early December, he said “universal values.” And one of the judges who I said is acting like a prosecutor, pulled them up short and said, “No, no, no, those are Western values. Every country can have its own values.”
Well, that’s nonsense. We’re celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that was signed by China and one of the main drafters was Chinese. And the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is now trying to rewrite “universal values” and act as if it’s all country specific and culturally determined is nonsense and shows the extent to which they’re willing to rip up any semblance of a rules-based international order.
W: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I just want to remind people listening, we did a little documentary, I think it was about 10 minutes long or something, where we had fellows of our center, including Guangcheng, talk about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including Sam Brownback, who was the US Ambassador for international religious freedom.
And it’s available on our website. So I want to mention that for everybody because you can go to that website and you can find a lot of information, including past podcasts. And before I forget, I want to mention that when they had the… whatever, the aborted trial or the delayed trial in… last year, anyway, Father Robert Sirico was there and he discussed it with us on our podcast, which people can find on the website. And you mention in your book — I don’t know if I mentioned the book. If I didn’t, it’s… Mark’s book is called “The Troublemaker,” which is interesting, “How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”
And I believe, I believe he called himself a troublemaker.
M: He called himself [that]. Sometimes people kind of raise their eyebrows a little bit, like, “You’re calling him a troublemaker. You know, aren’t the Chinese just going to use that against him?” But he does call himself a troublemaker. It was an interview, well, shortly before he went into prison. So I think in 2019 or 2020.
But I also mean it in the sense of, I mean, he means a troublemaker. Like, he’s a restless guy; as an entrepreneur, as seeking spiritual solace, seeking political freedom, working for economic freedom. He’s a guy that’s stirring things up all the time. And interestingly, many of us know the famed Civil Rights — late Civil Rights icon John Lewis. And he talked about “making good trouble.” And I think that’s what Jimmy wants to do, wants to make good trouble.
And interestingly, in the course of researching the book, long after I’d settled on the title, I found out that Jimmy had in fact met John Lewis. They had serendipitously run across each other on a 2019 trip that Jimmy made to Washington, D.C., and he was in the Capitol with Martin Lee and, in fact, Tom Suozzi. And they were walking along and there was John Lewis. And so Jimmy said, Tom Suozzi introduced them and. And Jimmy said, “Hey, will you make a…” because he knew that Lewis was a real apostle of non violence, he goes, “Will you make… Mr. Lewis, will you make a video for the students of Hong Kong imploring them to use nonviolence?”
So here’s Jimmy now on trial for subversion, collusion with foreign forces, and he’s such a genuine patriot. He loves China and Hong Kong so much. And that one time that he serendipitously met John Lewis, he asked him to make a video about nonviolence.
W: It is amazing. What’s happening to him is kind of the final crushing of the democracy protest movement in Hong Kong, which was a nonviolent movement.
M: For the most part. Yeah, during… Well, I think there was violence, we have to be honest. It was mostly against property. There were some injuries. There was at least one elderly man who was kind of… was an innocent bystander who was killed, apparently, by something thrown by students. So we shouldn’t pretend that it’s as nonviolent as John Lewis would have liked.
But I think that reflected years, really 25 years of frustration with China, not making good on its promises for more democracy in Hong Kong, and an absolute unwillingness on the part of the authorities to negotiate with students or with activists. I mean, it’s remarkable. Can you imagine a city where 2 million people out of a city of 7 million, 7 and a half million, come out in the streets not just once, but two or three times? Repeatedly: Half a million, a million, two million, again and again. Two million people. And the government won’t even talk, let alone fall. I mean, any open society, they’d respond to people. Instead, they just cracked down harder. The police were more and more violent, more and more brutal. The government resisted any attempts at accountability, and instead they turned to Beijing for muscle.
And they got it. Both, we believe, in the form of additional police reinforcements who came over the border, but above all, in this new set of laws that basically criminalize dissent, criminalize free thought.
W: Yeah. Again, I want to mention for the listeners that the first human rights lecture in our annual lectures was with Guangcheng, and it was about, specifically about what was going on in Hong Kong. So they can find that at the webpage if they’re interested, which is humanrights.catholic.edu. That’s our Center for Human Rights website.
You know, and we were talking about before we started recording, Mark, just to remind people, or maybe people who are listening for the first time, this was the Umbrella Movement, right? And so…
M: Yeah, well, yeah, so the… Let’s go back a little bit further: 1997, 156 years of British colonialism, and China takes Hong Kong, or resumes sovereignty, as the Chinese would say, and they promise 50 years of freedom, that Hong Kong’s way of life could remain unchanged for 50 years.
There would be freedom of press, freedom of worship, freedom of assembly, all the freedoms that we have in an open society. Not only that, there’d be more. There’d be a move towards universal suffrage and full democracy, which had been limited during the British period. And I think that’s… the students, and Jimmy Lai, took the Chinese at their word. And so they pushed and pushed. And in 2003, there were a half a million people out in the street protesting China’s attempt to crack down on dissent and to impose a national security law. So the government backed off, but didn’t move towards more democracy.
And people got frustrated. And so in 2014, so we’re talking 17 years after the handover, a whole generation of people have grown up. I mean, there were young students who were. Who wouldn’t even remember the British period. They were born around the time of the handover. They started this Umbrella Movement.
And umbrellas were both… They were kind of a shield against tear gas. It just shows you, in a way, how naive and hopeful these students were. I mean, we’d hardly ever seen tear gas in Hong Kong before. And then one night in late September 2014, 87 rounds of tear gas were fired.
That was a big deal. Well, by the time it was over, you know, I mean, just hundreds of rounds were just fired without anybody noticing. Very bad. But the students camped out for 79 days. They occupied an area around the government headquarters in downtown Hong Kong. No violence. It was just like, you know, peace and love and harmony.
And it was very nice. And it, you know, kind of ran out of steam. And the students left. Jimmy Lai was there. He had ceded leadership. He wasn’t… He’s not really a political leader, which is also ironic. But he wanted to show solidarity, to bear witness with the students.
And for 79 days, he sat in front of a tent he had. He didn’t sleep there at night. He went home to his house at night. But for 79 days, he sat there. He’d talked to anybody who talked to him. He endured the, I guess, humiliation and discomfort of having somebody dump pig guts all over him, some hired thugs, and at the end, he was tear gassed and at the end he offered himself up for arrest and he was arrested, although charges weren’t filed.
So fast forward things simmer along for a few more years. We fast forward to 2019, and the government tried to introduce legislation that would basically allow it to [be] easy for the government to send people back to China to face their courts. Now no Hong Kong person, including any Hong Kong businessman, wants to think that when they’re sitting in their house, or in their apartment in Hong Kong, that somebody’s going to come and drag them over the border to face so-called “justice” in China, which is of course rule by law, nothing like justice.
So that’s what led to the, to the big protests and the government just stubbornly refused to back down, refused to talk, just adopted, I would say, more and more violent measures on the part of the police. The students responded in kind, although I would say, you know, destroying and vandalizing property, not hurting people for the most part.
W: Yeah. And it was, at least in my opinion, it was really the COVID pandemic that kind of brought everything to a close. Because I remember at the time of those protests there was a kind of an expectation and — not an… Yeah, kind of a confident expectation that these would go on until the change came. That was, I mean, the protests were just not backing down.
M: And more than that, there were elections at the end of November 2019 for the lowest level positions in Hong Kong; district council offices, almost 500 seats up. So really low level, like ward politicians. They control a small budget, but they don’t have anything to do with the whole citywide running of things.
And Beijing confidently — and the Hong Kong government expected that there was going to be a silent majority, so-called “blue tide” that was going to sweep in all the pro-Beijing candidates, and I’m told [on] pretty good authority, they had newspaper articles written, they were editorials, they were ready to go trumpeting their victory.
Instead, it was a smashing win by the pro-democrats and they got almost all of those, roughly 500 seats. And, I think at that point the Chinese, the CCP, Xi Jinping said, “Whoa, we have lost Hong Kong.”
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.