Rep. Chris Smith to chair hearing on imprisoned Catholic democracy advocate Jimmy Lai

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., will chair a congressional hearing Sept. 16 examining the imprisonment of Hong Kong media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, timed to occur just ahead of a planned Sept. 24 Trump-Xi summit that Catholic advocates have been urging the administration to use as another chance to press for Lai’s release.

Smith, co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, will lead the Sept. 16 hearing titled, “A Son and Daughter's Appeal to Xi Jinping to Release Their Dad, Jimmy Lai,” scheduled for 9:30 a.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building and livestreamed publicly. Planned witnesses include Lai's son, Sebastien Lai, who leads the #FreeJimmyLai campaign; Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation and author of a Lai biography; and a senior China researcher from the Heritage Foundation.

The hearing follows a year of escalating diplomatic appeals. After a May summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he had personally raised Lai’s case, but that Xi’s response “was not positive.” 

"He told me that would be a tough one," Trump said, contrasting it with China's apparent openness to releasing detained pastor Ezra Jin. 

A bipartisan group of more than 100 lawmakers had urged Trump before the trip to press Xi on Lai’s behalf, warning his continued imprisonment risked becoming “an irreversible tragedy.” China ultimately released Jin in July, a move human rights advocate Nina Shea argued in the National Review showed Xi retains full power to free Lai as well, dismissing suggestions that Hong Kong's legal system ties his hands as “laughable.” Shea noted Trump and Xi were due to meet again in September in Washington, giving the President “another shot at freeing Lai.”

Lai, the Catholic founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was sentenced in February to 20 years in prison after being convicted on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of conspiracy to publish “seditious” material, largely stemming from commentary critical of Beijing that the paper published. His daughter, Claire Lai, said hours after the sentencing that the 78-year-old, who has spent years in prison, some of it in solitary confinement, is “only sustained by his faith,” adding that even a shorter sentence “would have been a death sentence” given his physical condition. In a Washington Post op-ed months earlier, she described his rapid physical decline in more detail: diabetes, hypertension, failing hearing and vision, and heart problems that emerged only after his imprisonment began, with no outside doctor permitted to examine him.

Despite his fragile health, Lai’s Catholic faith has remained a constant thread in how his family describes his imprisonment. Claire has said her father, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, continues to evangelize from his cell, drawing pictures of the crucifixion on scraps of paper alongside instructions on how to pray and distributing them among fellow prisoners. 

She has pointed to what she considers small signs of Divine Providence: the family was told a verdict was coming on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the sentence was ultimately handed down on the feast of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, a Marian visionary. 

“It's almost like the Blessed Mother is telling us that she is watching over our father,” Claire said. 

She added that his letters to her consistently close with prayer, including one in which he wrote that he trusted himself entirely to God’s hands.

Lai’s advocates argue his case carries weight beyond his own circumstances. Shea has noted that Lai, in addition to his advocacy for Hong Kong democracy, helped fund the rebuilding of Catholic churches in mainland China that were destroyed under Mao Zedong, framing his imprisonment as part of a broader Chinese Communist Party effort to suppress religious life alongside political dissent.

As the Trump-Xi summit approaches, Smith’s hearing next week will mark the latest attempt by American lawmakers to keep pressure on Beijing over Lai’s case.