Jimmy Lai rose from a poor boy in China to a billionaire in Hong Kong.
In this episode, we'll learn about his inspiring story and how he gave up everything to become Hong Kong's most famous freedom activist.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Jimmy Lai.
[00:00:27] He was one of the most successful businessmen in Hong Kong, worth billions of dollars. But he decided that there was something he valued more than money: freedom.
[00:00:38] His is a story of entrepreneurship, Hong Kong, democracy, China, communism, protest, bravery and conviction, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:51] OK then, let’s get started and learn about the story of Jimmy Lai.
[00:00:58] In life, one chance meeting can change everything.
[00:01:03] For Jimmy Lai, this came at some point in the mid 1950s.
[00:01:09] He was a small boy, just 8 or 9 years old at the time, and he was working as a railway porter in Canton, modern day Guangzhou, in southern China.
[00:01:22] China had officially turned communist in 1949, and within a few years anyone who was deemed opposed to the revolution found themselves in a difficult position.
[00:01:36] Jimmy Lai’s father was one such person. He had been a successful businessman, but his business, house and possessions were stripped from him and both he and his wife, Jimmy’s mother, were sent to a labour camp for reeducation.
[00:01:55] Jimmy was on the street, doing anything he could to make ends meet.
[00:02:00] Including carrying people’s suitcases to and from trains in Canton railway station.
[00:02:08] This gave the young boy a rare opportunity to experience the outside world, the world beyond the impoverished streets upon which he lived.
[00:02:20] The nature of a railway station is of course that people come and go, and it gave Jimmy the chance to see how people lived, how they dressed, what life was like outside communist China.
[00:02:35] And one day, after carrying a well-dressed man’s baggage, the man stopped. He gave Jimmy a few coins as payment, but he reached into his pocket and brought out a bar of chocolate. He gave it to Jimmy, who looked astounded. He had never seen a bar of chocolate before, let alone tasted one.
[00:02:59] He opened it, bit into it, and the starving little boy was immediately hit by the delicious taste of velvety chocolate.
[00:03:10] He turned to the man and asked him where he was from, to which he responded “Hong Kong”.
[00:03:18] Jimmy thought that Hong Kong must be heaven, because he had never tasted anything so delicious.
[00:03:25] He was determined to get to this idyllic place, this mythical land of wealth and most importantly, chocolate: Hong Kong.
[00:03:35] Now, it took him a few years, but when he was just 12 years old he managed to stow away on a boat with another 100 or so children of a similar age, and they made it to Hong Kong.
[00:03:51] Today you can make the trip from Guangzhou to Hong Kong on a high-speed train - it takes only 50 minutes - but back then it would have taken several hours, with these poor young boys and girls packed away like sardines at the bottom of a boat swaying from side to side with the waves.
[00:04:11] When he arrived, it was a different world.
[00:04:15] Hong Kong was still a British colony, and compared to mainland China, its economy was booming. It was a regional manufacturing centre, with thousands of factories producing garments and household goods.
[00:04:30] It was a far cry from the People’s Republic of China that Jimmy left behind, which had started its bold experiment with collectivisation that would lead to the deaths of tens of millions of its citizens.
[00:04:45] Jimmy, who let’s remember, was only a 12 year old boy at the time, immediately started working in one of these factories, a factory making gloves.
[00:04:57] It was hard, mindless and dangerous work with 12 hour days, and indeed the young boy lost part of a finger in an industrial accident.
[00:05:08] But there was something about the city, something about Hong Kong, that inspired him. It seemed like a place where anything was possible.
[00:05:19] Early on in his time there he realised that there was a skill that he needed to develop, a skill that perhaps you might also be thinking about: to speak English.
[00:05:31] This wasn’t some great foresight on his part, or that he had read about the economic growth of America, it was a simple practical reason: he saw that the people in the factories who pointed at him and gave orders all spoke English, so he thought “if I want to be one of those one day, if I want to get ahead, English seems like something I should know”.
[00:05:58] Fast forward a few years and Jimmy had worked his way up, becoming the manager of a factory. He received a year end bonus, invested it in Hong Kong’s booming stock market, had a few big wins, and branched out on his own.
[00:06:16] Now, we aren’t going to talk so much about his business career, but he launched what would become Giordano, a clothing brand that you might have heard of.
[00:06:28] Despite its Italian-sounding name, Giordano is 100% Jimmy Lai, it is a Hong Kong brand. He joked about picking the name from a napkin in a New York pizza joint.
[00:06:43] He was clearly a talented businessman, and before long there were thousands of Giordano shops all over the world, especially in Asia.
[00:06:53] This made Jimmy Lai a very rich man, a billionaire.
[00:06:58] At the same time that all of this was happening, so in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political winds were changing both in mainland China and in Hong Kong.
[00:07:12] Mao Zedong had died in 1976, and after his death China had embarked on a policy of opening up its economy. Jimmy Lai had been a direct beneficiary of this, as mainland China was a key market for Giordano, but he was still distrustful of the authorities in Beijing.
[00:07:37] And then, in 1989, there were the Tiananmen Square protests, with the resulting crackdown on the student protestors.
[00:07:46] This flipped a switch for Jimmy Lai, as he knew that if the Chinese government could do this in Beijing, it wouldn’t be long before they could do this in Hong Kong too.
[00:07:59] And it’s now that we have to switch gears a little for some Hong Kong history, and in fact some Hong Kong geography too.
[00:08:09] Hong Kong island, the 80 kilometre squared island, was handed over to the British in 1842 after the first Opium War.
[00:08:19] After the Second Opium War, which ended in 1860, the British acquired more territory on mainland China itself, Kowloon and Stonecutters Island.
[00:08:31] And then in 1898, Britain acquired a much larger piece of land, called the “New Territories”.
[00:08:40] But this was different.
[00:08:42] Instead of China giving this piece of land to Britain, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Britain taking this land from China, the arrangement was for a 99 year lease.
[00:08:56] In other words, China rented this piece of land to Britain for a period of 99 years.
[00:09:05] There was no explicit provision in the contract specifying what would happen after the 99 years, in 1997 but as Hong Kong continued to develop economically and become an important regional hub, there was no question about it returning to China.
[00:09:25] This leased piece of territory was by far the largest part of Hong Kong, so it would have been almost impossible for the British to keep the much smaller Hong Kong island, Kowloon Peninsula, and Stonecutter’s Island
[00:09:38] The entire thing would go back, the leased piece of territory and the two smaller pieces of Hong Kong. It would all be returned to China.
[00:09:48] So, starting in the late 1970s, negotiations began between Britain and China about what Hong Kong returning to China would look like.
[00:09:59] It would not be simple.
[00:10:01] After all, mainland China was a one-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:10:08] Hong Kong was never a full electoral democracy, but it had taken important steps towards democracy, especially after people had seen what had happened across the border in Tiananmen Square.
[00:10:21] There was a huge discrepancy in wealth and living standards. China in 1997 had a GDP per capita of under $800, while Hong Kong’s was more than $27,000.
[00:10:36] What’s more, they had very different political and legal systems.
[00:10:41] So, the negotiators had the difficult task of agreeing what would happen to Hong Kong after it was handed back to China.
[00:10:49] How would Hong Kong be governed and administered? What laws would apply? How would it all work?
[00:10:56] The agreement that was reached was “one country, two systems”. In other words, Hong Kong would become part of China again, but it would operate in a different, unique way.
[00:11:11] This framework was meant to last for 50 years, to give time for Hong Kong to properly be absorbed into China, so this process would start in 1997 and continue until 2047, 23 years from now.
[00:11:29] And this brings us back to Jimmy Lai.
[00:11:32] He had seen what had happened in Tiananmen Square, he had seen the suppression of the human rights and freedoms that he had come to enjoy in Hong Kong, and he was worried.
[00:11:43] In 1995, with $100 million of his own money, he decided to start a newspaper, which he called Apple Daily.
[00:11:54] It was quite a sensational publication, covering everything from news to gossip to scandalous stories.
[00:12:01] Nobody was immune to its criticism, not even the Chinese communist party.
[00:12:08] It was staunchly pro democracy, and in editorials it argued for free speech, the right to protest, and the defence of civil liberties.
[00:12:20] It soon became one of the most popular newspapers in Hong Kong, and this was a problem for Beijing.
[00:12:28] Jimmy Lai’s house was attacked multiple times, he received death threats, once he even returned home to find a skinned dog on his doorstep.
[00:12:40] While all of this was going on, he was still the owner of the Giordano clothing brand, whose key market was mainland China.
[00:12:49] There were political campaigns in China encouraging citizens to boycott the brand, as it was run by an enemy of China. Running the company in China became increasingly difficult, and in 1996, a year after launching Apple Daily, Lai was forced to sell his stake in Giordano.
[00:13:11] It simply wasn’t tenable any more.
[00:13:15] To do business in China, especially at the kind of level that Jimmy Lai was at, you cannot be publicly critical of Beijing, and you most certainly cannot run a pro-democracy newspaper.
[00:13:28] A year later, in 1997, the handover took place, and Hong Kong returned to China.
[00:13:37] And slowly but surely, the pressure from Beijing started.
[00:13:42] The people of Hong Kong, who had enjoyed the freedom to protest and had experienced the fledglings of democracy, soon started to feel the pressure of the Chinese government.
[00:13:54] Pro-democracy lawmakers were sidelined, Hong Kong laws were replaced by Beijing ones, there was increased censorship and control over the media.
[00:14:06] Lai’s Apple Daily became a beacon of pro-freedom and pro-democracy, and Lai himself became a prominent figure in the pro-democracy movement.
[00:14:17] He would organise protests, he would be there with everyone else in a t-shirt, sitting peacefully or speaking into a megaphone.
[00:14:26] And the emphasis on peace is an important one. He always made sure that any protest that he was involved in was a peaceful one, that he never resorted to violence.
[00:14:39] Even when the police attacked protestors, with tear gas for example, he encouraged them to fight their violence with peaceful means. You might remember the “umbrella movement” from 2014, where protestors were encouraged to put up umbrellas to protect themselves from tear gas and water cannons that the police would fire at them.
[00:15:02] But peaceful or not, Beijing did not like Jimmy Lai.
[00:15:09] Now, remember that after the handover in 1997, the agreement for Hong Kong had been “one country, two systems”. In other words, Hong Kong was part of China but it had things like a different legal system.
[00:15:26] And for several years, citizens of Hong Kong were protected from some of the more draconian of China’s laws and security measures, which intensified after Xi Jinping took over as President in 2012.
[00:15:42] For example, in 2015, China passed its National Security Law, which was intended to protect the country and its citizens, but its critics have said has made it easier to lock up anyone who is critical of the government.
[00:15:58] In Hong Kong there was no such law, and indeed after the law was passed on the mainland, the chief executive of Hong Kong–essentially the main regional political leader–said that there were no plans to include a similar law.
[00:16:16] One country, two systems remember.
[00:16:19] But fast forward only 5 years, and in 2020 Hong Kong got its own national security law.
[00:16:29] It is deliberately difficult to interpret, but the upshot is that it granted Beijing supreme authority over Hong Kong laws, and the Chinese government the ability to interpret the law as it saw fit.
[00:16:44] It meant that people could be held without trial, that people could be deported to China, and it put an exceeding amount of pressure on the media.
[00:16:54] Apple Daily, the pro-democracy newspaper founded by Jimmy Lai, was a casualty of this.
[00:17:02] In August of 2020, just a few months after the law was passed, the offices of Apple Daily were raided, and the following June 500 police officers charged into the offices, arresting multiple people, including Jimmy Lai.
[00:17:18] He was led out in handcuffs, the then 72-year-old frogmarched out of the company’s offices, flanked by two stern-looking police officers.
[00:17:30] And since then his bank accounts have been frozen, and properties seized.
[00:17:36] He has been in and out of court multiple times, and has faced charges of everything from unlawful assembly to conspiring and colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security.
[00:17:51] His flagship newspaper, Apple Daily, was forced to close down in 2021, dealing a crippling blow to the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
[00:18:02] And to this day Jimmy Lai has remained in custody.
[00:18:09] As of the time of writing this episode, his trial is ongoing, but its outcome is a foregone conclusion.
[00:18:18] To date, national security trials have a 100% conviction rate, and there is little doubt that it will remain at 100% long after the verdict is passed on Jimmy Lai.
[00:18:33] If he is convicted, which may even have happened by the time this is released, he faces spending the rest of his life in prison.
[00:18:42] In all probability he will never be allowed to see his family again, he will never taste the freedoms that he fought so hard to preserve.
[00:18:51] There is clearly a lot to admire about Jimmy Lai, but perhaps the most revealing thing about his character is that he stayed in Hong Kong throughout all of this, when he could have very easily escaped to the United States or the UK or Taiwan or any other country, and continued his pro-democracy advocacy from there.
[00:19:15] But he didn’t.
[00:19:16] He stayed, knowing full well the fate that awaited him: a show trial, a public conviction, and then the remainder of his life behind bars.
[00:19:27] And for that alone, I think he is certainly a man whose story deserves to be told.
[00:19:35] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Jimmy Lai.
[00:19:39] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:43] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:46] We have lots of members from mainland China and from Hong Kong, so I know that this is a sensitive topic, but I would love to know what you think.
[00:19:54] What do you think lies in store for Jimmy Lai? How is Hong Kong changing, and how has it already changed?
[00:20:01] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:04] You can head right into our private community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:13] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Jimmy Lai.
[00:00:27] He was one of the most successful businessmen in Hong Kong, worth billions of dollars. But he decided that there was something he valued more than money: freedom.
[00:00:38] His is a story of entrepreneurship, Hong Kong, democracy, China, communism, protest, bravery and conviction, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:51] OK then, let’s get started and learn about the story of Jimmy Lai.
[00:00:58] In life, one chance meeting can change everything.
[00:01:03] For Jimmy Lai, this came at some point in the mid 1950s.
[00:01:09] He was a small boy, just 8 or 9 years old at the time, and he was working as a railway porter in Canton, modern day Guangzhou, in southern China.
[00:01:22] China had officially turned communist in 1949, and within a few years anyone who was deemed opposed to the revolution found themselves in a difficult position.
[00:01:36] Jimmy Lai’s father was one such person. He had been a successful businessman, but his business, house and possessions were stripped from him and both he and his wife, Jimmy’s mother, were sent to a labour camp for reeducation.
[00:01:55] Jimmy was on the street, doing anything he could to make ends meet.
[00:02:00] Including carrying people’s suitcases to and from trains in Canton railway station.
[00:02:08] This gave the young boy a rare opportunity to experience the outside world, the world beyond the impoverished streets upon which he lived.
[00:02:20] The nature of a railway station is of course that people come and go, and it gave Jimmy the chance to see how people lived, how they dressed, what life was like outside communist China.
[00:02:35] And one day, after carrying a well-dressed man’s baggage, the man stopped. He gave Jimmy a few coins as payment, but he reached into his pocket and brought out a bar of chocolate. He gave it to Jimmy, who looked astounded. He had never seen a bar of chocolate before, let alone tasted one.
[00:02:59] He opened it, bit into it, and the starving little boy was immediately hit by the delicious taste of velvety chocolate.
[00:03:10] He turned to the man and asked him where he was from, to which he responded “Hong Kong”.
[00:03:18] Jimmy thought that Hong Kong must be heaven, because he had never tasted anything so delicious.
[00:03:25] He was determined to get to this idyllic place, this mythical land of wealth and most importantly, chocolate: Hong Kong.
[00:03:35] Now, it took him a few years, but when he was just 12 years old he managed to stow away on a boat with another 100 or so children of a similar age, and they made it to Hong Kong.
[00:03:51] Today you can make the trip from Guangzhou to Hong Kong on a high-speed train - it takes only 50 minutes - but back then it would have taken several hours, with these poor young boys and girls packed away like sardines at the bottom of a boat swaying from side to side with the waves.
[00:04:11] When he arrived, it was a different world.
[00:04:15] Hong Kong was still a British colony, and compared to mainland China, its economy was booming. It was a regional manufacturing centre, with thousands of factories producing garments and household goods.
[00:04:30] It was a far cry from the People’s Republic of China that Jimmy left behind, which had started its bold experiment with collectivisation that would lead to the deaths of tens of millions of its citizens.
[00:04:45] Jimmy, who let’s remember, was only a 12 year old boy at the time, immediately started working in one of these factories, a factory making gloves.
[00:04:57] It was hard, mindless and dangerous work with 12 hour days, and indeed the young boy lost part of a finger in an industrial accident.
[00:05:08] But there was something about the city, something about Hong Kong, that inspired him. It seemed like a place where anything was possible.
[00:05:19] Early on in his time there he realised that there was a skill that he needed to develop, a skill that perhaps you might also be thinking about: to speak English.
[00:05:31] This wasn’t some great foresight on his part, or that he had read about the economic growth of America, it was a simple practical reason: he saw that the people in the factories who pointed at him and gave orders all spoke English, so he thought “if I want to be one of those one day, if I want to get ahead, English seems like something I should know”.
[00:05:58] Fast forward a few years and Jimmy had worked his way up, becoming the manager of a factory. He received a year end bonus, invested it in Hong Kong’s booming stock market, had a few big wins, and branched out on his own.
[00:06:16] Now, we aren’t going to talk so much about his business career, but he launched what would become Giordano, a clothing brand that you might have heard of.
[00:06:28] Despite its Italian-sounding name, Giordano is 100% Jimmy Lai, it is a Hong Kong brand. He joked about picking the name from a napkin in a New York pizza joint.
[00:06:43] He was clearly a talented businessman, and before long there were thousands of Giordano shops all over the world, especially in Asia.
[00:06:53] This made Jimmy Lai a very rich man, a billionaire.
[00:06:58] At the same time that all of this was happening, so in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political winds were changing both in mainland China and in Hong Kong.
[00:07:12] Mao Zedong had died in 1976, and after his death China had embarked on a policy of opening up its economy. Jimmy Lai had been a direct beneficiary of this, as mainland China was a key market for Giordano, but he was still distrustful of the authorities in Beijing.
[00:07:37] And then, in 1989, there were the Tiananmen Square protests, with the resulting crackdown on the student protestors.
[00:07:46] This flipped a switch for Jimmy Lai, as he knew that if the Chinese government could do this in Beijing, it wouldn’t be long before they could do this in Hong Kong too.
[00:07:59] And it’s now that we have to switch gears a little for some Hong Kong history, and in fact some Hong Kong geography too.
[00:08:09] Hong Kong island, the 80 kilometre squared island, was handed over to the British in 1842 after the first Opium War.
[00:08:19] After the Second Opium War, which ended in 1860, the British acquired more territory on mainland China itself, Kowloon and Stonecutters Island.
[00:08:31] And then in 1898, Britain acquired a much larger piece of land, called the “New Territories”.
[00:08:40] But this was different.
[00:08:42] Instead of China giving this piece of land to Britain, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Britain taking this land from China, the arrangement was for a 99 year lease.
[00:08:56] In other words, China rented this piece of land to Britain for a period of 99 years.
[00:09:05] There was no explicit provision in the contract specifying what would happen after the 99 years, in 1997 but as Hong Kong continued to develop economically and become an important regional hub, there was no question about it returning to China.
[00:09:25] This leased piece of territory was by far the largest part of Hong Kong, so it would have been almost impossible for the British to keep the much smaller Hong Kong island, Kowloon Peninsula, and Stonecutter’s Island
[00:09:38] The entire thing would go back, the leased piece of territory and the two smaller pieces of Hong Kong. It would all be returned to China.
[00:09:48] So, starting in the late 1970s, negotiations began between Britain and China about what Hong Kong returning to China would look like.
[00:09:59] It would not be simple.
[00:10:01] After all, mainland China was a one-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:10:08] Hong Kong was never a full electoral democracy, but it had taken important steps towards democracy, especially after people had seen what had happened across the border in Tiananmen Square.
[00:10:21] There was a huge discrepancy in wealth and living standards. China in 1997 had a GDP per capita of under $800, while Hong Kong’s was more than $27,000.
[00:10:36] What’s more, they had very different political and legal systems.
[00:10:41] So, the negotiators had the difficult task of agreeing what would happen to Hong Kong after it was handed back to China.
[00:10:49] How would Hong Kong be governed and administered? What laws would apply? How would it all work?
[00:10:56] The agreement that was reached was “one country, two systems”. In other words, Hong Kong would become part of China again, but it would operate in a different, unique way.
[00:11:11] This framework was meant to last for 50 years, to give time for Hong Kong to properly be absorbed into China, so this process would start in 1997 and continue until 2047, 23 years from now.
[00:11:29] And this brings us back to Jimmy Lai.
[00:11:32] He had seen what had happened in Tiananmen Square, he had seen the suppression of the human rights and freedoms that he had come to enjoy in Hong Kong, and he was worried.
[00:11:43] In 1995, with $100 million of his own money, he decided to start a newspaper, which he called Apple Daily.
[00:11:54] It was quite a sensational publication, covering everything from news to gossip to scandalous stories.
[00:12:01] Nobody was immune to its criticism, not even the Chinese communist party.
[00:12:08] It was staunchly pro democracy, and in editorials it argued for free speech, the right to protest, and the defence of civil liberties.
[00:12:20] It soon became one of the most popular newspapers in Hong Kong, and this was a problem for Beijing.
[00:12:28] Jimmy Lai’s house was attacked multiple times, he received death threats, once he even returned home to find a skinned dog on his doorstep.
[00:12:40] While all of this was going on, he was still the owner of the Giordano clothing brand, whose key market was mainland China.
[00:12:49] There were political campaigns in China encouraging citizens to boycott the brand, as it was run by an enemy of China. Running the company in China became increasingly difficult, and in 1996, a year after launching Apple Daily, Lai was forced to sell his stake in Giordano.
[00:13:11] It simply wasn’t tenable any more.
[00:13:15] To do business in China, especially at the kind of level that Jimmy Lai was at, you cannot be publicly critical of Beijing, and you most certainly cannot run a pro-democracy newspaper.
[00:13:28] A year later, in 1997, the handover took place, and Hong Kong returned to China.
[00:13:37] And slowly but surely, the pressure from Beijing started.
[00:13:42] The people of Hong Kong, who had enjoyed the freedom to protest and had experienced the fledglings of democracy, soon started to feel the pressure of the Chinese government.
[00:13:54] Pro-democracy lawmakers were sidelined, Hong Kong laws were replaced by Beijing ones, there was increased censorship and control over the media.
[00:14:06] Lai’s Apple Daily became a beacon of pro-freedom and pro-democracy, and Lai himself became a prominent figure in the pro-democracy movement.
[00:14:17] He would organise protests, he would be there with everyone else in a t-shirt, sitting peacefully or speaking into a megaphone.
[00:14:26] And the emphasis on peace is an important one. He always made sure that any protest that he was involved in was a peaceful one, that he never resorted to violence.
[00:14:39] Even when the police attacked protestors, with tear gas for example, he encouraged them to fight their violence with peaceful means. You might remember the “umbrella movement” from 2014, where protestors were encouraged to put up umbrellas to protect themselves from tear gas and water cannons that the police would fire at them.
[00:15:02] But peaceful or not, Beijing did not like Jimmy Lai.
[00:15:09] Now, remember that after the handover in 1997, the agreement for Hong Kong had been “one country, two systems”. In other words, Hong Kong was part of China but it had things like a different legal system.
[00:15:26] And for several years, citizens of Hong Kong were protected from some of the more draconian of China’s laws and security measures, which intensified after Xi Jinping took over as President in 2012.
[00:15:42] For example, in 2015, China passed its National Security Law, which was intended to protect the country and its citizens, but its critics have said has made it easier to lock up anyone who is critical of the government.
[00:15:58] In Hong Kong there was no such law, and indeed after the law was passed on the mainland, the chief executive of Hong Kong–essentially the main regional political leader–said that there were no plans to include a similar law.
[00:16:16] One country, two systems remember.
[00:16:19] But fast forward only 5 years, and in 2020 Hong Kong got its own national security law.
[00:16:29] It is deliberately difficult to interpret, but the upshot is that it granted Beijing supreme authority over Hong Kong laws, and the Chinese government the ability to interpret the law as it saw fit.
[00:16:44] It meant that people could be held without trial, that people could be deported to China, and it put an exceeding amount of pressure on the media.
[00:16:54] Apple Daily, the pro-democracy newspaper founded by Jimmy Lai, was a casualty of this.
[00:17:02] In August of 2020, just a few months after the law was passed, the offices of Apple Daily were raided, and the following June 500 police officers charged into the offices, arresting multiple people, including Jimmy Lai.
[00:17:18] He was led out in handcuffs, the then 72-year-old frogmarched out of the company’s offices, flanked by two stern-looking police officers.
[00:17:30] And since then his bank accounts have been frozen, and properties seized.
[00:17:36] He has been in and out of court multiple times, and has faced charges of everything from unlawful assembly to conspiring and colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security.
[00:17:51] His flagship newspaper, Apple Daily, was forced to close down in 2021, dealing a crippling blow to the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
[00:18:02] And to this day Jimmy Lai has remained in custody.
[00:18:09] As of the time of writing this episode, his trial is ongoing, but its outcome is a foregone conclusion.
[00:18:18] To date, national security trials have a 100% conviction rate, and there is little doubt that it will remain at 100% long after the verdict is passed on Jimmy Lai.
[00:18:33] If he is convicted, which may even have happened by the time this is released, he faces spending the rest of his life in prison.
[00:18:42] In all probability he will never be allowed to see his family again, he will never taste the freedoms that he fought so hard to preserve.
[00:18:51] There is clearly a lot to admire about Jimmy Lai, but perhaps the most revealing thing about his character is that he stayed in Hong Kong throughout all of this, when he could have very easily escaped to the United States or the UK or Taiwan or any other country, and continued his pro-democracy advocacy from there.
[00:19:15] But he didn’t.
[00:19:16] He stayed, knowing full well the fate that awaited him: a show trial, a public conviction, and then the remainder of his life behind bars.
[00:19:27] And for that alone, I think he is certainly a man whose story deserves to be told.
[00:19:35] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Jimmy Lai.
[00:19:39] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:43] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:46] We have lots of members from mainland China and from Hong Kong, so I know that this is a sensitive topic, but I would love to know what you think.
[00:19:54] What do you think lies in store for Jimmy Lai? How is Hong Kong changing, and how has it already changed?
[00:20:01] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:04] You can head right into our private community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:13] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Jimmy Lai.
[00:00:27] He was one of the most successful businessmen in Hong Kong, worth billions of dollars. But he decided that there was something he valued more than money: freedom.
[00:00:38] His is a story of entrepreneurship, Hong Kong, democracy, China, communism, protest, bravery and conviction, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.
[00:00:51] OK then, let’s get started and learn about the story of Jimmy Lai.
[00:00:58] In life, one chance meeting can change everything.
[00:01:03] For Jimmy Lai, this came at some point in the mid 1950s.
[00:01:09] He was a small boy, just 8 or 9 years old at the time, and he was working as a railway porter in Canton, modern day Guangzhou, in southern China.
[00:01:22] China had officially turned communist in 1949, and within a few years anyone who was deemed opposed to the revolution found themselves in a difficult position.
[00:01:36] Jimmy Lai’s father was one such person. He had been a successful businessman, but his business, house and possessions were stripped from him and both he and his wife, Jimmy’s mother, were sent to a labour camp for reeducation.
[00:01:55] Jimmy was on the street, doing anything he could to make ends meet.
[00:02:00] Including carrying people’s suitcases to and from trains in Canton railway station.
[00:02:08] This gave the young boy a rare opportunity to experience the outside world, the world beyond the impoverished streets upon which he lived.
[00:02:20] The nature of a railway station is of course that people come and go, and it gave Jimmy the chance to see how people lived, how they dressed, what life was like outside communist China.
[00:02:35] And one day, after carrying a well-dressed man’s baggage, the man stopped. He gave Jimmy a few coins as payment, but he reached into his pocket and brought out a bar of chocolate. He gave it to Jimmy, who looked astounded. He had never seen a bar of chocolate before, let alone tasted one.
[00:02:59] He opened it, bit into it, and the starving little boy was immediately hit by the delicious taste of velvety chocolate.
[00:03:10] He turned to the man and asked him where he was from, to which he responded “Hong Kong”.
[00:03:18] Jimmy thought that Hong Kong must be heaven, because he had never tasted anything so delicious.
[00:03:25] He was determined to get to this idyllic place, this mythical land of wealth and most importantly, chocolate: Hong Kong.
[00:03:35] Now, it took him a few years, but when he was just 12 years old he managed to stow away on a boat with another 100 or so children of a similar age, and they made it to Hong Kong.
[00:03:51] Today you can make the trip from Guangzhou to Hong Kong on a high-speed train - it takes only 50 minutes - but back then it would have taken several hours, with these poor young boys and girls packed away like sardines at the bottom of a boat swaying from side to side with the waves.
[00:04:11] When he arrived, it was a different world.
[00:04:15] Hong Kong was still a British colony, and compared to mainland China, its economy was booming. It was a regional manufacturing centre, with thousands of factories producing garments and household goods.
[00:04:30] It was a far cry from the People’s Republic of China that Jimmy left behind, which had started its bold experiment with collectivisation that would lead to the deaths of tens of millions of its citizens.
[00:04:45] Jimmy, who let’s remember, was only a 12 year old boy at the time, immediately started working in one of these factories, a factory making gloves.
[00:04:57] It was hard, mindless and dangerous work with 12 hour days, and indeed the young boy lost part of a finger in an industrial accident.
[00:05:08] But there was something about the city, something about Hong Kong, that inspired him. It seemed like a place where anything was possible.
[00:05:19] Early on in his time there he realised that there was a skill that he needed to develop, a skill that perhaps you might also be thinking about: to speak English.
[00:05:31] This wasn’t some great foresight on his part, or that he had read about the economic growth of America, it was a simple practical reason: he saw that the people in the factories who pointed at him and gave orders all spoke English, so he thought “if I want to be one of those one day, if I want to get ahead, English seems like something I should know”.
[00:05:58] Fast forward a few years and Jimmy had worked his way up, becoming the manager of a factory. He received a year end bonus, invested it in Hong Kong’s booming stock market, had a few big wins, and branched out on his own.
[00:06:16] Now, we aren’t going to talk so much about his business career, but he launched what would become Giordano, a clothing brand that you might have heard of.
[00:06:28] Despite its Italian-sounding name, Giordano is 100% Jimmy Lai, it is a Hong Kong brand. He joked about picking the name from a napkin in a New York pizza joint.
[00:06:43] He was clearly a talented businessman, and before long there were thousands of Giordano shops all over the world, especially in Asia.
[00:06:53] This made Jimmy Lai a very rich man, a billionaire.
[00:06:58] At the same time that all of this was happening, so in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political winds were changing both in mainland China and in Hong Kong.
[00:07:12] Mao Zedong had died in 1976, and after his death China had embarked on a policy of opening up its economy. Jimmy Lai had been a direct beneficiary of this, as mainland China was a key market for Giordano, but he was still distrustful of the authorities in Beijing.
[00:07:37] And then, in 1989, there were the Tiananmen Square protests, with the resulting crackdown on the student protestors.
[00:07:46] This flipped a switch for Jimmy Lai, as he knew that if the Chinese government could do this in Beijing, it wouldn’t be long before they could do this in Hong Kong too.
[00:07:59] And it’s now that we have to switch gears a little for some Hong Kong history, and in fact some Hong Kong geography too.
[00:08:09] Hong Kong island, the 80 kilometre squared island, was handed over to the British in 1842 after the first Opium War.
[00:08:19] After the Second Opium War, which ended in 1860, the British acquired more territory on mainland China itself, Kowloon and Stonecutters Island.
[00:08:31] And then in 1898, Britain acquired a much larger piece of land, called the “New Territories”.
[00:08:40] But this was different.
[00:08:42] Instead of China giving this piece of land to Britain, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Britain taking this land from China, the arrangement was for a 99 year lease.
[00:08:56] In other words, China rented this piece of land to Britain for a period of 99 years.
[00:09:05] There was no explicit provision in the contract specifying what would happen after the 99 years, in 1997 but as Hong Kong continued to develop economically and become an important regional hub, there was no question about it returning to China.
[00:09:25] This leased piece of territory was by far the largest part of Hong Kong, so it would have been almost impossible for the British to keep the much smaller Hong Kong island, Kowloon Peninsula, and Stonecutter’s Island
[00:09:38] The entire thing would go back, the leased piece of territory and the two smaller pieces of Hong Kong. It would all be returned to China.
[00:09:48] So, starting in the late 1970s, negotiations began between Britain and China about what Hong Kong returning to China would look like.
[00:09:59] It would not be simple.
[00:10:01] After all, mainland China was a one-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:10:08] Hong Kong was never a full electoral democracy, but it had taken important steps towards democracy, especially after people had seen what had happened across the border in Tiananmen Square.
[00:10:21] There was a huge discrepancy in wealth and living standards. China in 1997 had a GDP per capita of under $800, while Hong Kong’s was more than $27,000.
[00:10:36] What’s more, they had very different political and legal systems.
[00:10:41] So, the negotiators had the difficult task of agreeing what would happen to Hong Kong after it was handed back to China.
[00:10:49] How would Hong Kong be governed and administered? What laws would apply? How would it all work?
[00:10:56] The agreement that was reached was “one country, two systems”. In other words, Hong Kong would become part of China again, but it would operate in a different, unique way.
[00:11:11] This framework was meant to last for 50 years, to give time for Hong Kong to properly be absorbed into China, so this process would start in 1997 and continue until 2047, 23 years from now.
[00:11:29] And this brings us back to Jimmy Lai.
[00:11:32] He had seen what had happened in Tiananmen Square, he had seen the suppression of the human rights and freedoms that he had come to enjoy in Hong Kong, and he was worried.
[00:11:43] In 1995, with $100 million of his own money, he decided to start a newspaper, which he called Apple Daily.
[00:11:54] It was quite a sensational publication, covering everything from news to gossip to scandalous stories.
[00:12:01] Nobody was immune to its criticism, not even the Chinese communist party.
[00:12:08] It was staunchly pro democracy, and in editorials it argued for free speech, the right to protest, and the defence of civil liberties.
[00:12:20] It soon became one of the most popular newspapers in Hong Kong, and this was a problem for Beijing.
[00:12:28] Jimmy Lai’s house was attacked multiple times, he received death threats, once he even returned home to find a skinned dog on his doorstep.
[00:12:40] While all of this was going on, he was still the owner of the Giordano clothing brand, whose key market was mainland China.
[00:12:49] There were political campaigns in China encouraging citizens to boycott the brand, as it was run by an enemy of China. Running the company in China became increasingly difficult, and in 1996, a year after launching Apple Daily, Lai was forced to sell his stake in Giordano.
[00:13:11] It simply wasn’t tenable any more.
[00:13:15] To do business in China, especially at the kind of level that Jimmy Lai was at, you cannot be publicly critical of Beijing, and you most certainly cannot run a pro-democracy newspaper.
[00:13:28] A year later, in 1997, the handover took place, and Hong Kong returned to China.
[00:13:37] And slowly but surely, the pressure from Beijing started.
[00:13:42] The people of Hong Kong, who had enjoyed the freedom to protest and had experienced the fledglings of democracy, soon started to feel the pressure of the Chinese government.
[00:13:54] Pro-democracy lawmakers were sidelined, Hong Kong laws were replaced by Beijing ones, there was increased censorship and control over the media.
[00:14:06] Lai’s Apple Daily became a beacon of pro-freedom and pro-democracy, and Lai himself became a prominent figure in the pro-democracy movement.
[00:14:17] He would organise protests, he would be there with everyone else in a t-shirt, sitting peacefully or speaking into a megaphone.
[00:14:26] And the emphasis on peace is an important one. He always made sure that any protest that he was involved in was a peaceful one, that he never resorted to violence.
[00:14:39] Even when the police attacked protestors, with tear gas for example, he encouraged them to fight their violence with peaceful means. You might remember the “umbrella movement” from 2014, where protestors were encouraged to put up umbrellas to protect themselves from tear gas and water cannons that the police would fire at them.
[00:15:02] But peaceful or not, Beijing did not like Jimmy Lai.
[00:15:09] Now, remember that after the handover in 1997, the agreement for Hong Kong had been “one country, two systems”. In other words, Hong Kong was part of China but it had things like a different legal system.
[00:15:26] And for several years, citizens of Hong Kong were protected from some of the more draconian of China’s laws and security measures, which intensified after Xi Jinping took over as President in 2012.
[00:15:42] For example, in 2015, China passed its National Security Law, which was intended to protect the country and its citizens, but its critics have said has made it easier to lock up anyone who is critical of the government.
[00:15:58] In Hong Kong there was no such law, and indeed after the law was passed on the mainland, the chief executive of Hong Kong–essentially the main regional political leader–said that there were no plans to include a similar law.
[00:16:16] One country, two systems remember.
[00:16:19] But fast forward only 5 years, and in 2020 Hong Kong got its own national security law.
[00:16:29] It is deliberately difficult to interpret, but the upshot is that it granted Beijing supreme authority over Hong Kong laws, and the Chinese government the ability to interpret the law as it saw fit.
[00:16:44] It meant that people could be held without trial, that people could be deported to China, and it put an exceeding amount of pressure on the media.
[00:16:54] Apple Daily, the pro-democracy newspaper founded by Jimmy Lai, was a casualty of this.
[00:17:02] In August of 2020, just a few months after the law was passed, the offices of Apple Daily were raided, and the following June 500 police officers charged into the offices, arresting multiple people, including Jimmy Lai.
[00:17:18] He was led out in handcuffs, the then 72-year-old frogmarched out of the company’s offices, flanked by two stern-looking police officers.
[00:17:30] And since then his bank accounts have been frozen, and properties seized.
[00:17:36] He has been in and out of court multiple times, and has faced charges of everything from unlawful assembly to conspiring and colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security.
[00:17:51] His flagship newspaper, Apple Daily, was forced to close down in 2021, dealing a crippling blow to the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
[00:18:02] And to this day Jimmy Lai has remained in custody.
[00:18:09] As of the time of writing this episode, his trial is ongoing, but its outcome is a foregone conclusion.
[00:18:18] To date, national security trials have a 100% conviction rate, and there is little doubt that it will remain at 100% long after the verdict is passed on Jimmy Lai.
[00:18:33] If he is convicted, which may even have happened by the time this is released, he faces spending the rest of his life in prison.
[00:18:42] In all probability he will never be allowed to see his family again, he will never taste the freedoms that he fought so hard to preserve.
[00:18:51] There is clearly a lot to admire about Jimmy Lai, but perhaps the most revealing thing about his character is that he stayed in Hong Kong throughout all of this, when he could have very easily escaped to the United States or the UK or Taiwan or any other country, and continued his pro-democracy advocacy from there.
[00:19:15] But he didn’t.
[00:19:16] He stayed, knowing full well the fate that awaited him: a show trial, a public conviction, and then the remainder of his life behind bars.
[00:19:27] And for that alone, I think he is certainly a man whose story deserves to be told.
[00:19:35] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Jimmy Lai.
[00:19:39] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:43] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:46] We have lots of members from mainland China and from Hong Kong, so I know that this is a sensitive topic, but I would love to know what you think.
[00:19:54] What do you think lies in store for Jimmy Lai? How is Hong Kong changing, and how has it already changed?
[00:20:01] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:04] You can head right into our private community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:13] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:18] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
