Days ahead of President Donald Trump’s Oct. 30 meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the son of imprisoned Catholic Chinese dissident Jimmy Lai spoke in Italy about hope that international efforts will obtain freedom for his father, who is in solitary confinement awaiting what will likely be a life sentence from a Hong Kong court.
On Oct. 25, at the annual Bussola/Daily Compass conference in northern Italy, Lai’s son Sebastien said that freeing his father “is now a humanitarian issue,” according to the New Daily Compass. Sebastien has been campaigning for his father’s release and speaking out about the conditions Lai has been kept in.
He added that he “hope[s] international pressure will convince the Chinese authorities to release [Jimmy Lai] or expel him from Hong Kong.”
According to an Oct. 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed by editorial board member William McGurn, Trump recently said that Lai’s situation is on his list of topics to address with the Chinese president.
“They’re big enemies,” Trump said of Lai and Jinping, “so we’ll see what happens.”
The closing arguments for Lai’s trial — which was held before a jury the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reportedly hand-selected — took place in August. In an interview with the New Daily Compass published Oct. 27, Sebastien sounded certain that his father will be given a guilty verdict that condemns him to life imprisonment — but, the outlet noted, with Lai’s health conditions as an almost 78-year-old man confined to a hot windowless cell, such a verdict will essentially spell death for him.
Lai, who has been in prison for about five years, was the founder of the independent newspaper The Apple Daily. In 2020, pro-democracy advocates staged large-scale demonstrations in Hong Kong, and Lai and his newspaper “were a kind of lightning rod for the tens of thousands of demonstrators,” according to the New Daily Compass. Authorities forced the newspaper to close in 2021.
Sebastien told the New Daily Compass that working to secure Lai’s release now does not contradict Lai’s decision in 2020 to stay in Hong Kong despite the risks because much has changed in the meantime.
“Back then, my father felt responsible for all his journalists and for those who supported him in his fight for freedom. If he had left, he would have endangered them; they would have become the focus of the regime's ‘attention,’” he said. “Today, however, the situation is very different. If Jimmy Lai were to leave Hong Kong, no one would be in danger as a result.”
At the conference, Sebastien gave a testimony on how Lai has drawn closer to God during the years in prison, especially by prayer and reading the lives of the saints and the catechism, according to the New Daily Compass.
Sebastien explained how Lai’s witness shows “that ideals only find their true dimension and consistency within a broader horizon that opens up to the eternal,” New Daily Compass Editor-in-Chief Riccardo Cascioli reported.
“[Lai] shows that courage is not the fruit of a heroism for the few,” Cascioli wrote, “but fidelity to the Truth of one’s self that anyone can embody, and that freedom is not simply a political objective, but the outcome of belonging to Christ.”
Earlier this month, more than 30 bipartisan senators led by Foreign Relations Committee chairman Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, sent a letter to Trump urging him to secure Lai’s release when he meets with Jinping.
“You understand the urgency of his plight: a devout Catholic, a beloved husband, father, and grandfather; and an ardent campaigner for freedom,” the signatories state in the letter, according to an Oct. 24 press release from the committee. “Now, after almost five years in solitary confinement, Mr. Lai’s trial under Hong Kong’s National Security Law is coming to an end, but time is not on his side — he must be released immediately.”
Emphasizing that Lai’s health is deteriorating, the senators wrote that the humanitarian case for his release “is stronger and more dire than ever, which is why this must be addressed at the highest possible level.”
They also wrote that Lai’s representatives have confirmed he would never return to Hong Kong if freed and would not stay in public life.
“Should he die in prison, on the other hand,” they wrote, “he would become a martyr; a powerful and enduring symbol of opposition.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, the Chinese Foreign Ministry office in Hong Kong communicated “strong dissatisfaction and resolution opposition” to the senators’ intervention.
“The fuss makes clear,” McGurn writes in his piece, “that Mr. Trump is the only one who can get the 77-year-old Mr. Lai, arguably the world’s best-known political prisoner, out of jail.”