- Hong Kong's Native Son
Mark Clifford's The Troublemaker is an insider account of the jailed Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai's trajectory from child refugee to successful entrepreneur to democracy activist. Clifford served on the board of Lai's media company, Next Digital, and hosted his daily livecast with politicians, activists, and academics from around the world during the mogul's last few months of freedom.
The 77-year-old Lai—founder of the now-shuttered Apple Daily, the top-selling Hong Kong newspaper known for its prodemocracy, anti–Chinese Communist Party (CCP) stance—was arrested in mid-2020 under the Beijing-imposed National Security Law. He was granted bail but arrested again in December 2020 and has been imprisoned since late that year. At the time of this writing, he is on trial for "conspiring to collude with foreign forces" and "conspiring to publish seditious materials" in Apple Daily. He faces up to life imprisonment on top of the nine years and eight months he has already received for other drummed-up charges.
In the book's foreword, Natan Sharansky, a Soviet dissident who spent nine years in a gulag, compares Lai to Alexei Navalny, the Russian anticorruption activist and political dissident who died in an arctic prison in March 2024. Sharansky addresses the often-asked question: Why did Navalny return to Russia after multiple assassination attempts, knowing that he was certain to be arrested? He was not "fighting for his [End Page 188] survival," Sharansky writes, but "for the future of his people." Navalny wanted Russians to know that he was "not afraid of Putin" and nor should they be. His "life and his message inspire millions" (p. xiv). Substitute Lai for Navalny and you immediately grasp why Lai did not leave Hong Kong despite the risk of spending the rest of his life in prison or worse.
Lai is willing to give everything for Hong Kong because Hong Kong made him who he is today. He spent his early childhood in China on the streets while his mother was in and out of labor camps during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and 1960s for having "wealthy in-laws and a businessman husband who had fled to Hong Kong" (p. 12). In 1961, when Lai was twelve, he convinced his mother to let him find a better life in Hong Kong and stowed away on a fishing boat with only a dollar in his pocket. Upon arriving in the city, he found work, and a place to sleep, in a garment factory. In 1975 at the age of 27, Lai bought the bankrupt knitwear manufacturer Comitex. Six years later, he founded the fast-fashion chain Giordano.
But Lai's is not the usual rags-to-riches story. Few other Hong Kong tycoons would dare speak out against Beijing as Lai has. "Jimmy and I were the only two guys," said fellow businessman and antigovernment activist Herbert Chow, who fled the city in 2023 to avoid arrest. "We looked to the left and looked to the right and we only saw each other" (p. 180).
Clifford's biography of Lai has shown me that if Hong Kong made Lai who he is today, then Lai made Hong Kong what it was yesterday—that is, the free Hong Kong that we once knew, but is now gone. Those of us who were born and raised in Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, who called it home, put down deep roots, and would become the cornerstones of future social movements, grew up not believing that it was "a borrowed place on borrowed time." The Troublemaker makes me realize, however, that Hong Kongers' fight for democracy really did operate on borrowed time: Beijing was determined to deny democracy and kill our freedoms. As Tiananmen protesters fought for economic and democratic reforms in 1989 and the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to Beijing drew closer, the slogan...