You are listening to part three 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: Yeah, it’s incredible. Again, I know some people listening are a lot younger than I am, but, you know, in 1988, nobody expected 1989 was going to be the end of communism, or I should say the end of communism in Europe, because the one place it hung on was in Asia and particularly in China.
And it was then that they crushed Tiananmen Square. And so if you think about it, it’s almost like the greatest tyrant from that period, the one that survived it all, it’s the Chinese Communist Party and this guy is standing up to them.
Mark Clifford: And it’s more and more Xi Jinping versus Jimmy Lai. Toe to toe. I am convinced that Jimmy Lai can be freed from prison, but it’s Xi Jinping that’s going to have to make that decision.
W: Well, I think you mentioned before that he’s living free in prison or freedom in prison. And again, I’ve got a copy of your book here in my hands. But you’ve got the forward to the book by Natan Sharansky. Why don’t you, just in case people have forgotten who he is, say a word about him and why you have that as the intro.
M: Yeah. So Natan Sharansky was a so-called “refusenik,” a Soviet Jew who was refused permission to leave the country and emigrate to Israel during the 1970s. He spent nine years in the Soviet gulag. He’s a man of extraordinary bravery and freedom. And I was fortunate enough to talk to him on several occasions.
One of which was when I moderated one of these livestreams between Jimmy and Natan. Actually I shouldn’t say I really did much because it was really Jimmy peppering Natan with questions about how to be a model political prisoner. And Natan writes about this in the foreword and I’ve talked with him subsequently as well.
And the two of them were put together just about, as it turns out, about a month before Jimmy was imprisoned. And Sharansky says he’s never met anybody like Jimmy. Jimmy instinctively knew what he needed to do, which is to speak up and not crumble, not give in, and to live free in prison.
And Sharansky, during our livestream and other conversations with Jimmy and me, has talked about his philosophy of living freely in prison. He would say that he can’t decide when he’s going to be physically free. Only the KGB, or in this case only Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party, can decide that.
But Sharansky decided, and I think Jimmy is also doing this, decided he could live freely, spiritually and intellectually. So physically, that’s somebody else’s choice. But in his mind and in his spirit and in his soul, he could live freely. And I believe that’s what Jimmy’s doing. It’s, you know, he’s one of a billion, in that sense.
I mean, there are other dissidents, there are other, you know, very, very brave political prisoners in Hong Kong, in China. I think one of the things that makes Jimmy unique is just the —well, I shouldn’t say — Jimmy’s unique because of the whole package of who he is. So he’s rich, right?
I mean he was a billionaire. I mean, the Chinese have been stealing his money, stealing his assets, but he’s still worth many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. So that gives him the ability to hire good lawyers. It gave him the ability to travel around and make friends and meet people around the world when he was free, including in Washington, but also inviting people to his house in Hong Kong.
He loved to entertain. His dinners would have everybody from Catholic missionary nuns to Nobel prize winning economists, and media people, political people. Just incredible. He’s rich with everything that that buys. He had a megaphone because he owned a media company. That really scares the Chinese, because they understand the importance of propaganda because they do it and that’s all they do.
And they don’t want anybody messing with their monopoly on news and information and propaganda. He’s a free press guy. He’s a big, big, big free press guy, you know, he owned one of the biggest Chinese language media operations in the world. At least one of the freest, you know, one of the biggest free ones.
He’s a deep Catholic and his faith underpins… and the strength he gets from his faith underpins the courage with which he’s born, the suffering that he’s undergoing. So I think this combination of wealth, media savvy, freedom and spiritual faith makes him a guy that the Chinese are having a hard time knowing what to deal with.
I mean, he has principles that he’s willing to die for. And the Chinese really only understand power and they can’t understand why a guy would do this. And so they’ve tried to destroy him time and again. After he started Next Magazine in 1990, he wrote a column excoriating the so-called “Butcher of Beijing,” a guy named Li Peng, who was the premier.
And the Chinese responded by shutting down one of his clothing stores, one of his Giordano stores in Beijing. They figured like virtually every other businessman, he’d cave, he’d crumble because he cared more about making money than about, you know, whatever ideas he had about democracy. Jimmy said “Forget it.”
He resigned. First he resigned from the board, and then he sold his stake in the company, a couple hundred million dollars. Put that into Apple, into Apple Daily. The Chinese have just not understood who they’re dealing with. And they are dealing with a guy who — I mean, God forbid, I hope it doesn’t come to this, but he would give up his life in prison rather than succumb to what the Chinese Communist Party wants him to do, which is plead guilty and beg for…
W: Yeah, it is incredible courage, determination, belief in principles bigger, you know, than himself, bigger than his own life. I thought it was really interesting — and in the first part of your book, when you talk about that, there are the tunnels that are, I guess… were shut down just to bring Jimmy Lai to trial.
M: Yeah. So when they move him around, they give him just as much, almost as much security as Xi Jinping himself gets. So the only time I know of — and I lived in Hong Kong 28 years — there are three tunnels that run underneath the harbor. There are no bridges between.
So connecting Hong Kong island with Kowloon and the mainland part of Hong Kong, part of the city and territory of Hong Kong. There are three tunnels. They’re never shut. They’re not shut. In typhoons, never shut. Except for Xi Jinping and for Jimmy Lai. They move him around like he’s, you know, Osama bin Laden, like he’s some terrorist.
They put him in a big, kind of Brink-style armored truck, but even bigger, this lumbering beast. Within that, my understanding is they have him in a cage, shackled. And he’s described in some things — I’ve seen him right in prison. Sometimes he’ll look out and you’ll see, he loves food.
He’s really a gourmet and a gourmand. He’ll look out and he sees some barbecued pork, some char siew, and he starts thinking, and then he kind of wakes himself up and says, “No, that’s gluttony. I’m not going to be a sinner.” But he does daydream a lot about eating and eating good food.
And obviously in prison, he does not eat good food.
W: The way they deal with those tunnels just illustrates, like you said, it emphasizes for the CCP, they understand the magnitude of the threat posed by the kind of person you’ve been describing to their monopoly on power, and which they then abused for their own personal… You know, the best way to get rich in China is to join the CCP. Um, and then everybody else suffers.
It makes me think, talking to, you know, Chen Guangcheng grew up in a tiny rural village, poor. And within a couple of… in the first months of his life, he went blind. He was not born blind. He went blind because his mother couldn’t get medicine. Now, the commies took power in China, promising to help the rural poor.
Well, they couldn’t even get him 25 cents worth of medicine. And so he stood up to the CCP and they put him in jail. And in fact, when he escaped, it was an international campaign to get him out. And it’s detailed in his book, and it’s kind of miraculous.
But, when he… Before he escaped, what they were planning to do was to… They were building a cage around his house. They were going under the foundations and over the top, and he was going to be like a bird in a cage, isolated from everybody. So the commies, they have a pretty shrewd understanding of what they’re up against with people like Guangcheng and Jimmy, and I think that all of us listening need to realize these are high stakes for freedom, for universal values, for humanity.
In this trial… is the trial supposed to go for a certain more number of weeks?
M: Well, it was supposed to go for 80 days. We’re now over 100. And Jimmy’s still testifying. It should have been, you know, completed long ago.
W: By the way, I… because you were saying, what, this is not a real trial, a true trial. He couldn’t get his counsel he wanted.
M: Right. So one of the reasons it was delayed is that he asked for something that was guaranteed under the basic law, that mini-constitution that the Chinese themselves promulgated and imposed on Hong Kong. But they decided for Jimmy that he couldn’t get his own lawyer. You’re supposed to have your own, be able to get your own lawyer in Hong Kong.
And under Hong Kong tradition and practice, if the best lawyer was in London or in Auckland or in Sydney, you had the money, you could get that lawyer. And it was great living for the lawyers there. And, it was actually, in all seriousness, it was very good for Hong Kong people because they could get some of the best legal minds in the world.
Jimmy had contracted with a guy named Tim Owen, who had successfully argued cases in Hong Kong before. And actually was in Hong Kong when some of this was unfolding. The government lost four consecutive court cases at three different levels of courts. They didn’t win a single one.
They’re sore losers. So they went to Beijing. They asked Beijing to rewrite the rules so that they could prohibit Jimmy from having his own lawyer. Beijing rewrote the rules, kicked it back, and gave the chief executive of Hong Kong, the mayor, who happens to be the same guy, John Lee, who shut us down, the right to deny Jimmy his own lawyer.
Another delay came when, after the prosecution spent the better part of 100 days not making any case at all, except to show that Jimmy lies guilty of practicing journalism and believing in freedom. Jimmy’s lawyers; I think they do want to leave a proper legal trail.
And so they asked for the charges to be thrown out. I mean, the case is a joke. I mean, I ran two newspapers in Hong Kong. I’ve had powerful bosses, tycoons who own papers. I’ve seen a lot of newspapers. Jimmy — and I’ve talked to a lot of people for this book —
Jimmy was probably the most hands-off newspaper proprietor I’ve ever heard of. On the one hand, he got strong views. He wrote a column. He wrote a column every week, about 1500 columns, mostly for Next Magazine. Um, and sure he may, you know, sometimes he’d have meetings with people and, you know, say what he thought.
There are other times he’d be gone for months or more at a time. I mean, he was really quite a relaxed kind of boss. And people told me something interesting. They said there was never any censorship at Jimmy’s. The only thing that would, his papers. You know, he had people who were, you know, kind of fellow travelers who were very, very close to senior Chinese Communist Party members.
And obviously, you know, a lot of people on the other part of the spectrum. Only thing that would get you in trouble is if you started writing about anything that smacked of socialist economics. He just didn’t like that. And his papers, and I say “papers” because there’s one edition in Hong Kong and another in Taiwan, as well as the magazines, Next Magazine in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, had lots of columns from economists, business people.
I mean, Jimmy’s a businessman. He’s a Hayekian, laissez faire kind of business guy in probably one of the most laissez faire cities that the world probably will ever see. And he made his money off freedom and he realized that, you know, the freedom to eat and then the freedom to make money was just a… kind of the first step on the road to higher freedom, political freedom, spiritual freedom.
And so, sorry, so get back to the lawyer thing. So in the case, in this case, they drag it out for months. The lawyers ask for it to be thrown out and the judges, you know, dutifully consider that for four or five months before they say “No, you got to go ahead.”
So I don’t know what they are thinking in Beijing, what is driving this, but they have three handpicked justices…oh, sorry. So he has only, I’m sorry, he has only local lawyers, and I don’t… I think they’re trying to do a good job but who knows what pressures they’re under.
Tim Owen, who is a king’s counsel, one of the best human rights barristers in the world, arguably, had been practicing, had been arguing cases in Hong Kong. His visa was denied. He was going to give a talk at the University of Hong Kong, that was canceled.
I mean, boy, talk about people who can’t handle the truth. I mean they just can’t handle another standpoint, so… another point of view. So it was delayed on those grounds. So he hasn’t had his own lawyer. He doesn’t have trial by jury. Instead he has three hand picked judges who are chosen from a secret panel that can handle national security law cases.
Those judges have been acting like prosecutors. I mentioned earlier that, you know, when he talked about universal human values, the judge, one of them tried to tell him there’s nothing universal about human values. It goes on and on and on. I don’t want to speculate because I really don’t know.
But it’s very curious that this trial is just like many of the political trials in Hong Kong, just going on forever. So I don’t know. I don’t know where Hong Kong authorities are coming from. I also wonder if these judges are considering the vulnerability, the way they’re opening themselves up to possible sanctions under Magnitsky style sanctions that sanction human rights abusers.
Because these are not judges, these are people acting as prosecutors, which is not what you do in the common law system.
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.