The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic

“Lai’s story, Clifford writes, has ‘exposed the cruelty and barbarity of the Chinese communist system.’”

The nature of the regime that currently poses an existential threat to the United States is revealed in Mark Clifford’s biography of Chinese dissident Jimmy Lai. Clifford in The Troublemaker calls Lai “one of the most important political prisoners of our age.” Lai’s courageous individual fight against the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that ended freedom and the rule of law in Hong Kong is at once inspiring and terrifying.

Lai was born in 1947 or 1948 in Guangzhou, China, a year before Communist forces declared victory over the Nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. When Lai was three or four years old, his father fled to Hong Kong which was then a British Crown Colony, but Lai and his siblings stayed behind with their mother (the CCP required children to remain in China).

Clifford, a journalist who lived in Asia between 1987 and 2020, notes that Lai’s mother was deemed a “class enemy” because her first husband fled to Hong Kong, and she remarried into a wealthy (and therefore suspect) family. She was subjected to struggle sessions and sent to a labor camp. Lai recalled that he and his siblings “just had to survive, struggle.” It was a haunting childhood growing up in Communist China. He witnessed executions, had trouble with the police, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s experienced hunger due to Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward.

In the early 1960s as a young teenager, Lai managed to escape to Hong Kong. He worked odd jobs and in factories and was determined to start his own business. He eventually became a very successful businessman, manufacturing clothing, running retail stores, and founding newspapers and magazines. He thrived in Hong Kong’s environment of free markets and capitalist competition. He traveled to London, New York, and other great cities and became a British citizen and eventually a very rich man.

Clifford tells the story of Lai’s rise in the business world with careful attention to detail based on Lai’s writings (including his prison letters) and interviews of Lai and others who have known or worked with Lai. It is a remarkable success story worthy of Horatio Alger. However, the heart of Clifford’s book is not Jimmy Lai’s rise to business prominence, but his fall at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

The turning point in Lai’s life was the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Up to that point, Lai believed the notion that Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms would lead to political reforms, and he hoped to expand his business empire from Hong Kong to the mainland. Clifford writes that “Something changed inside Lai during those fateful, emotionally charged months in the spring of 1989.” After Tiananmen Square, “Lai’s path would . . . be one that publicly and defiantly put him in opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.”

The year 1997 was another crucial turning point in Lai’s story. That was the year that Britain ceded governing responsibility of Hong Kong to China. The CCP promised to allow Hong Kong’s residents to enjoy the same freedoms and rule of law that they enjoyed under British governance for at least 50 years, but it was a promise the CCP had no intention of keeping. Eventually, China assumed greater political control of Hong Kong, and matters came to a head when China enacted a National Security law that effectively ended Hong Kong’s special status.

There were massive protests in Hong Kong, and the CCP ruthlessly cracked down on dissent. Lai turned his media properties, including Next magazine and Apple Daily newspaper, into organs of truth which exposed the corruption, cruelty, and political repression of the CCP. “To the Chinese Communist Party,” Clifford explains, “he represented an unusual threat. . . He had three assets that the party feared—money, independence, and influence.” Jimmy Lai became a warrior against communism—one that the CCP was determined to crush.

Lai and others who opposed the regime were prosecuted in show trials, accused and convicted by CCP-selected judges, not Hong Kong juries, of colluding with foreign powers and anti-state activities. In 2020, Lai was sentenced to prison, where he remains to this day. And he is currently being tried for crimes that could keep him in prison for life.

Yet, despite the hardships of prison detailed by Clifford, Lai has found an inner peace sustained by his family, friends, and his intense Roman Catholic faith. Clifford notes that Lai began life as an agnostic but converted to Catholicism later in life. He spends his time in prison reading books on Catholic theology, including The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross and the works of G. K. Chesterton. As Clifford notes, Lai “embraces the physical restrictions of prison as a way of nurturing mental and spiritual freedom.”

And Lai’s story, Clifford writes, has “exposed the cruelty and barbarity of the Chinese communist system.” A system that for far too long has enjoyed the financial and political support of many in the United States and the West who were (and are) motivated by greed or suffer from political naivete about the CCP.

Mark Clifford has written a great book about a great man.