Book Talk: Jimmy Lai and the End of Freedom in Hong Kong?
February 6, 2025
19:00
London (Frontline Club)
As the UK government cosies up with its counterparts in Beijing, author and Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation President Mark L. Clifford visits London to talk about his friend and former Next Digital and Apple Daily colleague, Jimmy Lai, who has now been unjustly imprisoned in Hong Kong for more than 1,400 days on spurious national security charges. Clifford’s new biography of Lai, “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic,” tells the astonishing story of how Lai’s power, platform and pro-democracy principles came to terrify the Chinese Communist Party.
Mark Clifford will be in conversation with Ian Williams, veteran China journalist and author of “Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy”.
For the inside track on what it was like to put Jimmy Lai’s extraordinary life onto the page, please save the February 6 date and join us at The Frontline Club. To RSVP and reserve your seat, please book a ticket via Eventbrite here.
Mark L. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, an NGO dedicated to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law for the people of Hong Kong. Previously, he was executive director of the Hong Kong–based Asia Business Council, and a board director at Next Digital, the Hong Kong media giant founded and majority-owned by Jimmy Lai. During his twenty-eight years in Hong Kong, he served as editor-in-chief of both English-language newspapers, the South China Morning Post and The Standard, of which he was also publisher. He held senior editorial positions at BusinessWeek and the Far Eastern Economic Review, in Hong Kong and Seoul, and lived in Asia from 1987 until 2020. He is the author of Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere.
Ian Williams is a journalist and author. His latest book, The Vampire State: the rise and fall of the Chinese economy was published in September. He was a long-time foreign correspondent in Moscow, China and the Far East for Channel 4 News and then NBC of America. He has also covered conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East and Ukraine. He won an Emmy and BAFTA awards for his discovery and reporting on the Serb detention camps during the war in Bosnia. He is the author of five books – two novels and three non-fiction. The novels Beijing Smog and Zero Days are tongue-in-cheek cyber thrillers. His non-fiction writing focusses on China: Every Breath You Take: China’s New Tyranny is a study of the surveillance state, while The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War looks at Beijing’s increasing global belligerence and was shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.
More on 'The Troublemaker'
This is the astonishing story of the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai who became one of Hong Kong’s leading activists for democracy and is today China’s most famous political prisoner.
As a close friend of Jimmy Lai who has known the Next Digital founder and Apple Daily publisher for more than three decades, Mark Clifford has penned the authoritative biography of the man Beijing is desperate to silence.
He was on Next Digital’s Board of Directors when 500 police raided Apple Daily and dragged off its editor-in-chief and other senior staff and now faces the prospect of immediate arrest should he return to Hong Kong. A former editor of both the SCMP and The Standard, Mark now campaigns for the release of Jimmy Lai and his fellow political prisoners as President of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.
As CFHK Foundation supporters will know, Jimmy Lai has been held hostage in solitary confinement for almost four years on bogus charges of sedition and collusion with foreign forces. His trial resumed on November 20, making the book’s December 3 release both timely and poignant. “The Troublemaker” captures an iconic life story, covering Jimmy Lai’s escape from China’s oppressive state when he was 12, and his efforts to build a manufacturing empire in Hong Kong before he turned 30 – first making sweaters for companies like The Limited, then setting up an early fast-fashion chain that became the model for Uniqlo. The tens of millions of dollars he made helped fund his publishing business, which he started after the 1989 Tiananmen killings. He later led opposition to China’s repressive approach to Hong Kong when the British retreated and the Communist party took over.
As Mark says of Jimmy Lai’s journalistic instinct: “There’s something irresistible about a man who creates a publishing empire by knowing that readers want everything – investigative reporting and salacious gossip.”
______________
Comments