When Jimmy Lai was a child working the streets of Canton (Guangzhou), China, in the 1950s, he received a bar of chocolate as a tip for carrying a man’s bags at a train station.
Poor and hungry, he immediately bit into the treat. He had never tasted anything like it, and he asked the traveler where he was from.
“Hong Kong,” the man replied.
Lai had never heard of Hong Kong, but he knew it was a place he wanted to be. So a few years later, at age 12, he stowed away on a fishing vessel and escaped mainland China for Hong Kong.
Lai immediately realized there was something different about the territory. He had never seen so much food or wealth before, and he quickly found work at a factory. Over several years, he worked, saved, and invested, and eventually as a young man Lai scraped up enough money to purchase a bankrupt clothing company and started manufacturing sweaters.
Lai’s entrepreneurship paid off. He prospered and diversified. He bought properties in Canada, and in the early 1980s launched the popular clothing brand Giordano (a name he picked up from a napkin from a New York City pizza joint). He later started newspapers, including the popular Next Magazine, which he founded in 1990, and the Apple Daily, which for years was the only pro-democracy daily newspaper printed in Chinese.
By 2008, Lai had become a billionaire and was on Forbes’s list of the wealthiest entrepreneurs. But at some point in his rags-to-riches story, Lai realized that wealth was not his ultimate goal.
Preserving the freedom of Hong Kong had become his life’s mission. “Without freedom, we have nothing,” Lai has often said.
In his quest to save Hong Kong’s rapidly fading freedom, however, Lai has sacrificed his own. The entrepreneur and media mogul currently sits in a Chinese regime prison, charged with “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces” and “conspiracy to publish seditious publications.”
Lai’s story was the subject of a 2023 documentary, “The Hong Konger: Jimmy Lai’s Extraordinary Struggle for Freedom,” produced by the Acton Institute. How it will end remains unclear.
