Jimmy Lai Faces Communist Justice in Hong Kong

Jimmy couldn’t be here tonight. He couldn’t be here because he is confined to a jail cell in Hong Kong. On Dec. 8 he will be 74 years old. But China’s Communists have jailed him because even at his advanced age they fear him. He is a dangerous example of the power of freedom, which he has dared to fight for no matter the consequences.

Those of us in the American press like to use the cliché of speaking truth to power. We give ourselves credit for reporting on the rich and powerful. But truth be told, we have it easy. We write under the protection of the First Amendment and the American rule of law. We have little chance of suffering for our work, and we congratulate ourselves with prizes—often with more self-regard than we deserve.

Jimmy risked everything to speak democratic truth to Communist power. That is real courage.

Jimmy Lai was born in 1948 in mainland China, as the Communist revolution was taking power. He and his two siblings had to fend for themselves as his mother raised them alone and worked away from home during the week.

As Jimmy has told the story and others have chronicled, at age 10 he was working as a baggage carrier at a train station when a passenger tipped him with a chocolate bar. He vowed to flee to a place where such things could be found. When he was 12 his mother arranged for smugglers to help him escape from China, which was then enduring the mad privation of Communist equality.

So Jimmy arrived in Hong Kong, where he worked in a sweatshop, earning the equivalent of $8 a month. He taught himself English, and by age 20 he was running the factory. A few years later he founded his own clothing company, Giordano, which he built into a retail…