This year for Day of the Imprisoned Writer, PEN is calling for urgent international action from November 15 – 29 to protect four writers targeted for their peaceful free expression work, including Jimmy Lai.
To inspire your own solidarity letter writing, read on for Madeleine Thien’s letter to Jimmy Lai.
November 12, 2024
dear Jimmy Lai,
On February 28, 2020, you were arrested by Hong Kong police in your home above Mong Kok district. Fifteen officers took you away in a car. The press was alerted beforehand so that you could be shamed as you emerged handcuffed; you did not appear to be ashamed. The alleged crime you committed was this: you had taken part in an illegal assembly.
You were arrested again on April 18 and August 10, 2020, released on bail, and arrested again on December 30, 2020. You have now been held in solitary confinement for nearly four years.
The charges against you are based on actions deemed criminal by the Hong Kong and Chinese governments: taking part in “unauthorised” protests and illegal assembly, including “inciting” others to take part in a vigil marking the anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen massacre. For your work as publisher of two of the most important free press publications in Hong Kong, you have been charged with conspiracy to print and distribute seditious materials. Even before this string of charges, you withstood years of harassment, surveillance, cyberattacks, firebombs, and threats of violence.
The current trial is set to resume on November 20, 2024, and if convicted, you face a possible life sentence. The National Security Law, passed by The National People’s Congress Standing Committee in China — completely bypassing Hong Kong’s legislature — became law on June 20, 2020, and is being applied retroactively. It criminalises any act deemed to be subversive to state power, including but not limited to acts of freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and freedom of expression. The use of the National Security Law, which itself violates Hong Kong’s Basic Law, is the administration of lawlessness. In 1944, reflecting on Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Hannah Arendt wrote that “a man caught in the bureaucratic machinery is already condemned; and that no man can expect justice from judicial procedures where interpretation of the law is coupled with the administering of lawlessness.”
As a child, you worked as a railway porter, and at the age of twelve, you smuggled yourself to Hong Kong. You worked in factories and, using a dictionary, taught yourself English. You speak the Cantonese of my mother and beloved family. Later on, you lived near to my mother’s neighbourhood in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district.
You are seventy-six years old.
Your family in mainland China, afraid of the repercussions that follow from association with a person deemed a political enemy, expunged your name from the ancestral record, which itself went back twenty-eight generations.
You and I, though we trace our families to the same region — Guangdong province in China — could not possibly be more different. You have the entrepreneurial spirit my parents would have applauded though they themselves always struggled to make ends meet. You made a fortune in textiles and retail stores, and then channeled this wealth into launching one of Hong Kong’s most powerful media companies. Next Magazine, established in 1990, and Apple Daily, which followed in 1995, became household names; renowned for their investigative journalism, they became two of the most influential and widely read publications in Hong Kong. I, on the other hand, read a great deal of history, teach literature, and write fiction; I break into a cold sweat every time I enter a bank. You employed hundreds of journalists who insisted on the existence of a free press not beholden to the state, a government, a Party or an oligarchy. You became what the government called, with all the force of its contempt and violence, a troublemaker. We both know that, in China, as in many other places today, a troublemaker must be publicly shamed and paraded so that others will choose silence; so that others will, out of fear, relinquish the moral world within themselves. This moral life is their only true possession, for it is their character, their selfhood, and their legacy; to lose it is to denude oneself.
You have spoken movingly of the months of demonstrations in Beijing and China in 1989, the powerful expression of civil society, which ended so horrifically in massacres of protesters and bystanders on June 4, and the arrests, show trials and imprisonments that followed. You have often said that these events transformed you. In the years after June 4, I, too, asked myself: what is the relation of power to me, and how do I exist in its violence? Where do my responsibilities, which are an expression of my love for this world, lead me? What is the thing which I am not permitted to say? What is the cost of not saying these words? What is the hope of speaking them?
On August 10, 2020, the Chinese government, in the guise of Hong Kong police, walked you in handcuffs through the offices of your newspaper. Some two hundred officers raided the premises, seizing documents and hardware; they have been, and will continue to be, unrelenting in their pursuit of further charges. They arrested editors and executives. They treated you, and those committed to the vocation of journalism, as terrorists. To report freely was treated as an intrinsically criminal act. To simply say, “We want the rights we are entitled to under the Basic Law,” was called sedition.
You have insisted that peaceful protest is a necessity, and that those who fight for justice should never act in vengeance, and must not cede their moral authority. I, too, believe this: I believe the world we want starts at this moment, not tomorrow. It is being created by every single act, every decision, we make.
I grieve that the Chinese government is making you a symbol of their power — of the brutality that will be inflicted on those daring to exercise freedoms which once belonged to all Hong Kongers under the Basic Law; rights which are human rights. I grieve that you, an elderly man, born in the same years as my lost and beloved parents, are suffering, and that the government is using your trial to flaunt its own impunity. The government’s message is clear: whether you have money, or whether you have nothing, your rights are contingent. We can hound you and remove you in an instant.
This situation is all the more devastating because our world is shattering. We are in a moment when violations against journalists and the free press are everywhere in horrific abundance; when trust in the mainstream media has collapsed; when, in the midst of a climate emergency, climate activists are pursued with the full force of the law; when dissent is being criminalised; when our governments in Canada, the United States and elsewhere have demonstrated, by their words and deeds, that they will minimize horror and turn a blind eye to the killing of journalists — indeed, to the barring of the world’s press from Gaza, where 70% of verified victims are women and children, where famine is imminent or already present, where Israeli media reports that ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is taking place — all the while asserting that they uphold international law and human rights. A British judge, David Neuberger, a former president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, was a member of the Hong Kong appeal court which unanimously dismissed your appeal, thereby upholding the authoritarian National Security Law; at the time of this ruling, Neuberger chaired the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, part of the Media Freedom Coalition, a partnership of countries working for freedom of the press; Canada, a previous co-chair, sits on the current Executive Group.
This double speak has revealed the abyss facing us all. As calamity circles us, we are in desperate need of more than empty words, more than realpolitik, more than acquiescence to a reality in which power claims the right to destroy everything and name it justice.
We are all caught in a net, knowing that those who supply weapons, extract resources, and make money from permanent war have repeatedly instrumentalized political movements for their own interests; against the brutality of authoritarian regimes, many who placed their faith in Western powers, and the values they claimed to uphold, have been cruelly betrayed. Yet, despite this broken world, your courage remains. Everywhere, the courage of activists and writers, journalists and publishers not only persists but deepens. In Hong Kong, Lebanon, Palestine, Kurdistan, Xinjiang, Sudan and more, we see, again and again, the bravery of individuals, journalists, writers, teachers and members of civil society; we see individuals who decide, stubbornly, to protect that most fragile, most powerful, of necessities: justice.
In a February 2021 letter to Mark Clifford, you wrote, “It’s hard not to have enemies. Yes, I have enemies. But funny enough, I don’t have a bit of hate.”
In your writings and interviews, you have conveyed how you found solace in your faith. In this, again, we are different; but I am reminded of my father who, until the end of his life, carried a card which requested that, should a stranger find him, they should summon a priest so that he could cleanse his spirit and make himself ready to meet his beloved, his father, his protector. Religious faith gave my father strength to face the heartaches of his life in the aftermath of war and brutality. This faith, too, was a source of the love which he nourished — even in the most difficult times. I recognise this quality in you, magnified, and I want to tell you that your courage is a light. It shows us a dignity which is sacred and belongs to all. May you receive the justice you have fought so hard to safeguard for others: may you be free. I and so many others owe you a debt which cannot be repaid; it can only be carried by keeping the faith and by refusing to give up our consciences, knowing that we owe our children something better.
In solidarity and with love,
Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, most recently Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Madeleine lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at The City University of New York.
