Sharp-eyed readers will notice that Peter Brookes’s fox, who normally tops this column, is absent. They can be reassured. He has gone to ground but will be (in hunting parlance) ‘bolted’ in time to return for future issues. I decided to remove the fox for Holy Week because the replacement drawing tells a story. It is by Jimmy Lai, the billionaire former boss of Apple Daily in Hong Kong. He drew it in solitary confinement in Stanley prison. He has now been incarcerated for nearly 2,000 days. This February, he was sentenced to a further 20 years for ‘conspiracy to collude with foreign forces’ and ‘to publish seditious materials’. Since Mr Lai is 78 and has a weak heart and diabetes, his is a life sentence, unless the authorities show – as the Chinese Communist Party never has – the quality of mercy.
Jimmy was born in poverty in mainland China. Aged eight, he worked as a porter at a station through which the few foreign visitors passed. One gave him half a bar of chocolate. He had never seen chocolate and asked where it came from. On hearing the answer ‘Hong Kong’, he replied: ‘Hong Kong must be heaven because I never tasted anything like that.’ Ever afterwards, he linked food and freedom. Aged 12, during the ‘Great Leap Forward’, Mao’s government-created famine in which over 30 million people died, he escaped, eventually reaching Hong Kong hidden in the bottom of a fishing boat. In time, he grew rich there in the rag trade. He acquired a pet bear and a white Rolls-Royce.
In 1989, Jimmy was about to branch into restaurants, but then came the Tiananmen Square massacre, with its implied threat to freedom in Hong Kong after the British departure in 1997. Stirred, Jimmy went into media, later inventing Apple Daily which, at its height, sold more than 800,000 copies. The name connected in his mind with spreading knowledge: ‘Eve ate the apple. Without the apple there would be no news.’ After the ‘national security’ crackdown in 2020, by which China violated its agreement with Britain, Mr Lai, godfather of the democracy movement, became the regime’s main enemy. After Christmas 2020, out on bail, he could see the end, and WhatsApped colleagues: ‘I’m f***ed. Delete everything.’ He has been in prison ever since. The authorities shut down Apple Daily.
Lai the tycoon had long been intellectually curious, especially about political and economic ideas, admiring Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, Friedrich Hayek and Sir John Cowperthwaite, the free-market former financial secretary of Hong Kong. He became a British citizen in 1994, explaining that the British ‘gave us the rule of law, private property, freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion. This is why China is very afraid of us’. Today, Britain seems very afraid of China, and gives merely token backing to its bravest citizen.
In the 1990s, Lai the believer also emerged. His second wife, Teresa, is a devout Catholic, and in 1997, the year of the handover, he converted, assisted by the future Cardinal Zen. As China’s net tightened on the territory, he thought often of the angel’s first words to the Virgin at the Annunciation: ‘Fear not, Mary.’ His daughter Claire tells me he was always clear-eyed about communist China and therefore apprehensive but, as he put it: ‘It’s God’s love which would conquer that fear.’
In prison, Mr Lai has plenty to fear. He is alone, on an otherwise empty floor, so high up in the building that elderly priests cannot climb the stairs to visit. The one window of his tiny cell is blocked. At night, the electric lights are turned off and he can see nothing. There is no air conditioning, so the summer heat gives him bad skin rashes. Denied outside medicine for his diabetes, he has only what prison medics deign to bestow. His back hurts. His nails fall out. His teeth rot. He is fed little but, even so, fasts every Friday. The prison rules are harsh. Usually he is denied the eucharist because it is classified as food: he has received the sacrament only 11 times in two and half years, but did so on Good Friday last year. Might that happen again this year? Confession is rarer still. Instead, permitted the Bible, and six books at a time which he rotates out, he tries to achieve the ‘acts of perfect contrition’ recommended by St Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan in Auschwitz who died offering his life to save another. He reads Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francis de Sales, Bonaventure, Benedict XVI, G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Merton and follows Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire discourses. He copies out St John Henry Newman’s prayer: ‘God has created me to do Him some definite service… I have my mission – I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.’
He also studies books about drawing, and returns repeatedly to certain subjects – Our Lady, the Annunciation, the Pietà and above all the Crucifixion, often accompanied by prayers he has composed himself. He lacks materials, allowed only simple lined paper, prison-supplied pencils and crayons. There is a charge for these items and if those paying on his behalf lack the precise change in cash, the entire request is rejected. In a letter to Claire in 2022, her father says: ‘When I draw I have such peace and joy’, but he also says, ‘I would have sent you one of my pictures, but it is not allowed now.’ This page’s picture comes from that year. None has come out since. But still he draws and, though he has no clock or watch, keeps his equivalent of monastic hours, waking himself in the middle of the night to pray and at what he guesses is 4.30 a.m. to read the Gospel. He relies, he says, ‘on the immense mercy of Christ’. To his daughter, he writes: ‘God’s grace is shining upon me. Cheers. Dad.’
Comments