alt Hacker NewsJimmy Lai Is a Martyr for Freedom
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Britain had the chance to liberalize Hong Kong before the handover negotiations even began. You can thank Murray MacLehose for the mess they're in now.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2025/06/13/the-empires-last-ab...
When the UK handed back HK, the Chinese who are nothing if not wiley, understood that they needed to maintain intelligence, surveillance, and some kind of institutional knowledge of the various organised crime groups, certain individuals with borderline business interests, that sort of thing. They offered the British police officers houses, stipends, and other incentives to stick around and clue-in the incoming crop of officials, domestic intelligence officers, and cutouts/go-betweens. Something of an untold story. Would make a great streaming series.
If there was one critical miscalculation the West (particularly the US) made in the last 40 years, it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms. There was a mistaking of capitalism for human rights. While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.
If investment was the key to liberalization, we would have seen far greater investment behind the then-fallen Iron Curtain, where countries had actively turned their backs on command economies. The cynic in me thinks that capital didn't like just how that had turned out. If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics and economics, they could also reject methods of accumulating capital that might run afoul of their values.
China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state. Anything else would be handled with the same totalitarian methods that political dissidents and class enemies were once handled with under Mao. While this has ebbed and flowed over the years, it essentially remains the system in place.
Lai is a victim of this miscalculation.
Never give up speech.
The sinomarxist mono-party is kind of doing their powerplay here.
The interesting thing is that the "two systems, one state" claim was revealed to have been a lie. I can kind of understand the position of China too, mind you - after all there was a war against the UK empire and they forced ceding territory (e. g. Hong Kong). But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences, and Beijing simply bulldozered through by force here. That's the total antithesis to freedom. Xi will focus on Taiwan next - that is also clear. It is in the "DNA" of the sinomarxistic philosophy (though one can wonder how much marxism with chinese focus is still left; it's kind of capitalistic led by a dictatorship. Oddly enough the USA is also transitioning to this by the tech-bros oligarchs.)
We kind of see that freedoms are being eroded. I don't know if that was always the case, or whether it just happens now more rapidly so; or is reported more often, but in the late 1990s I would say we had more freedoms, globally, than right now. Somehow the trend is going towards less freedom. Putin invading Ukraine, occupying land and killing people there is also highly similar to the pretext of the second world war, with the invasion of the Sudetenland by Germany, and then the Gleiwitz lie to sell the invasion of Poland. I think the only real difference here is that more countries have nukes. And smaller countries are kind of put in a dilemma now, since they can not offset bigger countries without nukes.
Leave it to Reason to pick out a billionaire as a martyr. Normally when I hear about free speech heroes, they've said something. Apparently, what Jimmy Lai stands against is the extension of China's "illiberalism" to Hong Kong.
What exactly is that supposed to be describing, and what is he against? If all he's against is the financial setup that allowed him to become as rich as he did, and the fact that he would have to deal with new masters as Hong Kong's colonial period was ended, why the hell should I care? What does Jimmy Lai stand for that China stands against that I should care about?
"Illiberalism."
Meanwhile, the EU just unpersoned a Swiss citizen, a writer, Jacques Baud*, for not taking the European side in the US-Russia conflict. Not for lying about it, but simply for not taking the European side. Not that Reason would support that, either, but China doesn't have any monopoly on "illiberalism," and illiberalism in the control of speech is far more important to me than the oppression of billionaires.
Lai's just getting Khodorkovsky'd: some of the rich think they're beyond government, when they operate purely through the blessing of and coddling by governments. You would think you would know that when all you do is accumulate and trade government promises in the form of currency, but the amount of praise you get as a disturbingly rich person must destroy brain function to some extent. There has got to be some atrophy in your sense of cause and effect and a distortion of your place in the world when you're on top in every room.
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* https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...
> Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, is a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.
> Therefore, Jacques Baud is responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability or security in a third country (Ukraine) by engaging in the use of information manipulation and interference.
a capitalist is a martyr for capitalism when they knowingly break laws in the country they live in? i'm no fan of authoritarianism but come on. this article is such typical Reason dreck.
Doesn't martyrdom imply, um, death?
I don't care about the specific politics, and I don't know his biography. You can love this man and hate China with the power of every cell in your body. But calling anyone a martyr, even with poetic license, has very specific connotations which don't seem to apply here.
>The dissident was convicted in Hong Kong earlier this week of two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces
>he also met with then–Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; at trial, Lai testified that he had asked them to voice their support for Hong Kong.
Yeah, I don't think that's going to help convince anyone buddy.
>he also met with then–Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo;
To sanctions HK politicians btw aka, comprador traitor gets the traitor treatment. Man should be in extraterritorial laogai in 247 stress positions but get kids treatment because CCP too lenient, and well they don't have those.
When I see the Hong Kong story, I can't help but feel worried for South Korea right now. It's like seeing Hong Kong starting all over again. Only saving grace is that the Korean peninsula has far too much of a strategic value to US military but ultimately its worrying that a Korean president will arrest/sue Korean citizens for criticizing China but not America.