'My friend Jimmy Lai, a British national, has been jailed by China. This must not stand. The Foreign Secretary owes it to Britain to speak up and act', Benedict Rogers

In his New Year’s message, China’s dictator Xi Jinping reiterated his promise that Taiwan will “surely be reunified with China”. Yet when the people of Taiwan, due to go to the polls to elect a new president in just over a week, look at Xi’s rule, it is unlikely that they will voluntarily choose his model of governance. That means the likelihood of China attempting to take Taiwan by force – militarily or by economic blockade or both – increases if Xi’s vision is to be fulfilled.

Xi’s relentless crackdown on human rights across China shows no sign of easing. 

The genocide of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in China’s western region of Xinjiang, with forced labour, forced abortion and forced sterilisation as the tools of terror alongside the incarceration of several million Uyghurs in concentration camps, reveals the true nature of the regime in Beijing. 

The persecution of religion does not stop with the Uyghurs. Last month Human Rights Watch accused China of closing, destroying and repurposing mosques as part of a “systematic effort” to curb the practice of Islam. Christians also continue to face persecution, with the news this week of the re-arrest of the Catholic Bishop of Wenzhou, Bishop Shao Zhumin, who has been routinely jailed in recent years.

In Tibet, a system of colonial boarding schools are separating children from their families and stripping them of their Tibetan Buddhist identity in what amounts to a cultural genocide. 

And across mainland China, dissidents and human rights defenders continue to be arrested and jailed, with the trial of activist Li Qiaochu beginning just before Christmas on charges of “inciting subversion of state power”.

But it is in Hong Kong where the decline is most stark. Over the past four years since the imposition of the draconian National Security Law in July 2020, freedom of expression, assembly, association and the press have all been stripped away. Hong Kong has turned from one of the most open cities in Asia, with a strong rule of law tradition, into one of the region’s most repressive police states.

Not surprisingly, over 190,000 Hong Kongers have applied for the UK’s British National Overseas (BNO) visa scheme in the almost three years since it was established, and thousands more have moved to Canada, Australia, Taiwan and elsewhere. According to a survey last year, more than half of Hong Kong’s professionals are considering leaving Hong Kong. It gives the lie to the Hong Kong government’s propaganda slogan “Happy Hong Kong”.

Hong Kong’s plight is illustrated most starkly this week with the trial of my friend Jimmy Lai, the 76 year-old Hong Kong entrepreneur, media tycoon and pro-democracy activist who has spent the past three years of his life in prison and may well remain there until he dies.

Accused of conspiring to collude with foreign forces, a crime under the National Security Law, and publishing “seditious” materials, in reality he is charged, as the head of his international legal team Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC puts it so brilliantly, with the crimes of conspiracy to commit journalism, for daring to publish stories and opinions which Beijing dislikes, conspiracy to talk about politics to politicians, and conspiracy to raise human rights concerns with human rights organisations. This farce must end.

In truth, Lai is a self-made billionaire whose rags-to-riches tale ought to be celebrated not prosecuted. After arriving in Hong Kong as a stowaway on a boat from mainland China at the age of 12, he worked as a child labourer in garment factories before working his way up the ranks to factory manager and then founded his own business, a chain of clothing stores known as Giordano, which became a huge success across Asia. He then branched out into the media industry, establishing Next Magazine and then the Apple Daily newspaper. 

To see someone you profoundly admire, and have the privilege of calling a friend, unjustly jailed and outrageously prosecuted in a gross miscarriage of justice under a draconian law that has torn apart the freedoms of the city where you began your working life and to which you yourself can no longer return is heartbreaking. 

To think of that hero, that friend, spending the rest of his life in jail, apart from the family he adores and which you know, love and respect, is heart wrenching.

To recall the lunches and dinners you had with that friend, to reflect that you may never see him again, and worse – to consider that every conversation you have had with him is now considered a “crime scene”, potentially used as evidence against him – is both gut wrenching and ludicrous.

And then, on top of that, to see several other friends accused in the same trial of being “co-conspirators” or “collaborators” makes you unsure whether you have walked into the pages of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland or George Orwell’s 1984 or some bizarre melange of the two.

This week, I was named as one of a number of foreigners with whom Lai had communicated or collaborated with. According to media reports, in court the prosecution displayed a chart labelled “Lai Chee-ying’s external political connections”, showing headshots of me, my friend Luke de Pulford and former US Consul-General to Hong Kong James Cunningham. A former US general, Jack Keane, and former US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, were also named. I feel very honoured to be in such company.

As “evidence”, the prosecution produced a text message Lai had sent me in 2019, asking me to ask the last governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten to provide a comment to his Apple Daily reporters. It was surreal that a perfectly normal, legitimate, day-to-day journalistic activity is now cited as proof of a “crime”.

The allegations against de Pulford and US-born financier and campaigner Bill Browder, both British citizens, and former Japanese Member of Parliament Shiori Kanno, as well as Lai’s assistant, US citizen Mark Simon, are more serious. They are accused of being co-conspirators with Lai, who is charged with being the “mastermind” of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and particularly the protests in 2019.

Such charges are utterly ludicrous. The idea that several million Hong Kongers took to the streets in 2019 at Lai’s command is so far-fetched as to be a fantasy. First, it’s an insult to them, as it suggests that they could not think and act for themselves. And second, it takes no account of the diversity within Hong Kong’s democracy movement. 

Lai is from the older, moderate generation of democrats in Hong Kong who never once challenged China’s sovereignty, never once advocated violence and always argued only for peaceful protest and the basic rights and freedoms promised to Hong Kong at the handover in a UN-registered international treaty, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and Hong Kong’s own mini-constitution known as the Basic Law.

Not once has Lai promoted secession. Never has he advocated violence. On the contrary, he remonstrated with more radical protesters, condemned extreme action and opposed calls for independence. The portrayal of this successful entrepreneur as a “radical political figure”, as the lead prosecutor claimed, is simply a figment of Beijing’s paranoid imagination. It would be hard for Beijing to find a more reasonable opponent.

Lai is a British national. And while he must always remain our focus, three other British citizens – de Pulford, Browder and to a lesser extent myself – have been dragged into it. This must result in a response from the British government.

For much of the past three years, the British government’s response to Lai’s case has been limp-wristed. From his arrest in December 2020, when then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab issued a statement, until the end of 2022 – two whole years – there was radio silence from Whitehall. In 2023, under growing Parliamentary and public pressure, the Foreign Office started to up its game, with Minister of State Anne-Marie Trevelyan meeting Lai’s son Sebastien several times and former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly raising Lai’s case at the United Nations and in Beijing. This was welcome, but not enough.

Last month, a very significant breakthrough came when new Foreign Secretary David Cameron met Sebastien, and called for Lai’s release, recognising him for the first time as a British citizen. It should never have taken so long, but it was nevertheless a very welcome step forward.

Now, with three other British nationals in the frame, the Foreign Secretary needs to step up again. He must condemn the unjust trial, the absurdity of dragging bogus allegations of contact with foreign nationals into the case, reject the whole charade as totally lacking anything to do with national security and as an entirely politically-motivated sham, and call for Lai’s immediate and unconditional release.

When China’s human rights record is reviewed at the UN later this month, in the “Universal Periodic Review” (UPR), a process which every member state goes through every four or five years, the British government must ensure that Hong Kong – and Lai’s case specifically – are raised prominently.

There’s one more thing he should also do. A year ago, Hong Kong Watch made an official submission to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), written by lawyers, with a cover letter by two of Britain’s top lawyers – Sir Geoffrey Nice KC and Baroness Helena Kennedy KC – advocating sanctions against Hong Kong’s Chief Executive and Beijing’s quisling, John Lee. 

A year on, the FCDO has yet to respond. It is time they did. 

When one British national faces the rest of his life in jail, and three British nationals are dragged in to an Alice In Wonderland trial, the Foreign Secretary owes it to Britain to speak up and act. Not simply for us. But for our values as a country.

This article was published in The Telegraph on 5 January 2024.