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A Hong Kong court has sentenced activist and publisher Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison. Lai was found guilty of violating a national security law late last year. NPR's Emily Feng reports.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Under cloudy skies in Hong Kong, Lai's wife, Teresa, made her way to the court on Monday, accompanied by Cardinal Joseph Zen, who baptized Jimmy Lai during his midlife Catholic conversion. Now 78 years old, Lai has gone through several changes. He'd once been a billionaire entrepreneur before starting a second career in his 40s as a media mogul, publishing the popular tabloid Apple Daily, and he'd first come to Hong Kong from mainland China as a young refugee.
CLAIRE LAI: My father was just a boy when he tasted a half-eaten bar of chocolate and went across the ocean.
FENG: That's Claire Lai, his daughter. She's been able to visit her father several times since he was arrested in 2020, just weeks after Beijing pushed through a sweeping national security law which punishes broad categories of dissenting behavior with up to life in prison.
LAI: What was the hardest was seeing his health deteriorate.
FENG: He was marched out of his offices, along with six of his media group's editors and executives. And when a national security court found the senior Lai guilty of sedition and collusion with foreign forces late last year, Lai was already serving another prison sentence for fraud regarding the rental lease for his media group's offices. His daughter worries even more now about his health.
LAI: In less than a year, he's lost over 10 kilos. He has heart issues. He has skin problems. He has infections, back issues, waist (ph) problems.
FENG: Though dozens of activists and opposition politicians have been charged under the national security law, Beijing has presented Lai as a particularly ferocious anti-China critic and the mastermind of protests against its rule in Hong Kong. Mark Clifford wrote a biography of Lai and he argues the activist served no one but Hong Kong.
MARK CLIFFORD: He's just indebted, beholden to Hong Kong for everything that it gave him.
FENG: Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made the U.K.'s first state visit to China in eight years. Lai's legal team hoped his possible diplomatic intervention might lessen a sentence for Lai, who is a British citizen. One of his lawyers, Jonathan Price, told NPR last December that Lai's poor health meant any sentence was tantamount to a life sentence. Along with Lai, six of his executives and two Hong Kong activists also received sentences on Monday of up to a decade. Lai did not speak at the sentencing, nor did he submit any letter of apology, but he did smile and wave to members of the public who came.
Emily Feng, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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