Do we like them?

Do we like Jimmy Lai?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent and on the right side, with real courage on the record, but the record on how he treated people and the gaps in what we could verify keep it from a nine.

Lai's life is a proper rags-to-riches yarn. Born in Guangzhou in 1947, he stowed away on a fishing boat to Hong Kong at 12 and worked as a child labourer in a glove factory. He founded the Giordano clothing chain in 1981, then sold out in the mid-1990s after Beijing pressured the company following his insult of Premier Li Peng over the Tiananmen crackdown.

From there he went into publishing, starting Next Magazine in 1990 and the tabloid-style Apple Daily about five years later, a paper that openly criticised the government. He joined the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests and, during the 2019 protests, urged US officials Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo to speak out on Hong Kong. He's an unusual billionaire: he picked a fight with Beijing when staying quiet would have been a lot cheaper.

Then came the crackdown. Beijing imposed the national security law in 2020 and Lai was arrested a little over a month later; he has been in custody since December 2020. In December 2025 he was convicted of two counts of foreign collusion and one of seditious publication, and on 9 February 2026 he was sentenced to 20 years, with the court calling him the “mastermind” of the conspiracies. He denied everything and told the court he is a political prisoner, while Hong Kong's government says the case has nothing to do with press freedom.

Now the harm check. We found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate, and that's an honest gap, not a clean bill on every topic. What we did find: he told the court he had “always opposed violence in any form” and admitted giving money to local opposition parties and to US think tanks and religious groups, while denying any political agenda. Whether lobbying Washington for pressure on Beijing is courage or, as the court found, collusion is the contested bit, and that depends on whether you accept the national security law as legitimate.

The legal record has a twist. In February 2026 Hong Kong's Court of Appeal quashed an earlier fraud conviction over the lease of Apple Daily's headquarters, which had carried a five-year-and-nine-month sentence, finding the trial judge had erred. Then in March his legal team said he would not appeal the national security conviction or sentence, giving no reason, so the 20 years stands.

The latest chapter is political rather than legal. In September Sebastien Lai testified at a US congressional commission hearing, and lawmakers introduced a bill named after his father that would require sanctions on officials if a Hong Kong political prisoner dies in custody from abuse or neglect. Hong Kong's government called it intimidation and said Lai used journalism as cover for collusion with foreign forces, which is a view plenty of governments and rights groups reject.