Jimmy Lai’s interminable prosecution has entered its final phase. The 77-year-old Hong Kong media tycoon and founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily faces two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces, under Hong Kong’s draconian, Beijing-imposed National Security Law (NSL). A guilty verdict would mean life behind bars.
But punishment is already being meted out. Lai, whose health is failing after years of pre-trial imprisonment in a tiny, windowless concrete cell, has become the most prominent example of a new form of authoritarian lawfare in China, in which the law, the courts and the police are weaponized as instruments of political control. Think Kafka’s The Trial rewritten as a procedural manual: punishment not through Mao-era struggle sessions, but the slow grinding attrition of judicial procedure.
Think Kafka’s The Trial rewritten as a procedural manual: punishment not through Mao-era struggle sessions, but the slow grinding attrition of judicial procedure.
A self-made entrepreneur who built a clothing empire before founding Apple Daily in the 1990s, Lai became one of the territory’s most outspoken champions of civil liberties. Hong Kong’s most widely read pro-democracy tabloid, Apple Daily was known for its sensationalist yet investigative journalism, covering everything from celebrity gossip to political corruption, along with commentary critical of Communist Party rule. Predictably, it was shut down under NSL provisions so sweeping they have been condemned internationally as a threat to media freedom.
The prosecution now cites 161 Apple Daily articles, along with Lai’s social-media posts and meetings with foreign politicians, as supposed proof of a plot to bring international pressure to bear on China. Even if that were true, it would miss the point: journalism is not a government press office. To recast international engagement as “collusion” is a deeply anti-democratic manoeuvre. Silencing figures like Lai is exactly what the National Security Law was built to do. Imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing in June 2020, it created four deliberately vague offences—secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces—each carrying penalties of up to life in prison. It also rewired the justice system. Bail is now presumptively refused unless a judge finds the accused will not “endanger” national security. The city’s Beijing-backed Chief Executive personally selects the pool of judges to hear NSL cases. Juries can be dispensed with on the Secretary for Justice’s say-so. And in 2021 expanded police powers granted by the NSL to order takedowns, freeze assets and seize travel documents were used to cripple Apple Daily before forcing its closure.
It was against this backdrop that Lai’s barrister, Robert Pang, mounted his closing defense. He insisted his client had been guilty of nothing more than voicing opinions, stressing that press freedom exists precisely because the media must be free to publish diverse information and viewpoints.
If “a publisher, or reporter, or journalist, is so concerned [with prosecution], there will not be the ability to provide for [sic] the information that the public has the right to know”, Pang told the court.
Earlier in the hearings, he was even blunter: “It is not wrong to try to persuade the government to change its policy. Nor is it wrong not to love a particular administration or even the country, because you can’t force someone to think in one way or another”.
Indeed not. But under the NSL you can hand someone an arbitrary, endlessly extendable stretch in jail—before or after trial—to reflect on their choices.
Under the National Security Law you can hand someone an arbitrary, endlessly extendable stretch in jail—before or after trial—to reflect on their political preferences.
Lai has been in custody since his arrest in August 2020, after the Court of Final Appeal confirmed the NSL’s presumption against bail. In the years since, he has been kept behind bars with a string of trumped-up charges—including unlawful assembly and fraud—while prosecutors readied the national security case. When the trial finally opened in December 2023, it was before a panel of government-designated judges, rather than a jury of Lai’s peers. Originally scheduled to last 80 sitting days, it has already dragged on for more than 140, spread across nearly two years of hearings and adjournments. Far from reflecting judicial resistance—a kind of plucky, de Certeau-style tactic, pushing back against the CCP’s meta-strategies—such delays are part of the machinery of punishment-by-process. As Amnesty International has found, bail is denied in almost 90% of NSL cases, with more than a third of defendants (40.3%) forced to endure over a year of pre-trial detention.
When the trial finally opened in December 2023, it was before a panel of government-designated judges, rather than a jury of Lai’s peers.
Prosecutors now claim that the Apple Daily articles neither offered “rational criticism” nor “venture[d] to suggest any solutions”, but instead amounted to an indirect call for foreign governments to sanction China after its crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. As proof, they point to Lai’s meetings with overseas politicians, including Taiwan’s former president Tsai Ing-wen, as evidence of “collusion with foreign forces”.
Even the three hand-picked judges presiding over the trial have at times sounded uneasy with the prosecution’s logic. Justice Esther Toh queried whether it was really necessary for an article to “venture to offer solutions” in order to avoid being considered seditious. Her colleague, Justice Alex Lee, put it more pointedly when noting that Apple Daily had opposed the introduction of the 2019 extradition bill: “They were opposing the very introduction of the extradition bill … was that not a suggested solution?”, he asked. Careful there, Comrade Lee.
Once closing arguments are concluded, the three-judge panel will deliberate, with a ruling anticipated before November—though, predictably, no date has been set.
That uncertainty, piled onto an already drawn-out process, recalls the case of the “Hong Kong 47”—opposition politicians, activists and community leaders rounded up in mass dawn raids in 2021. Accused of subversion for organizing unofficial pro-democracy primaries ahead of Hong Kong’s scheduled elections, they spent years in detention before the city’s largest ever national security trial.
Sentences were finally handed down last November. By May 2025, just four of the group had been released after their time served matched their sentences. As of September 2025, eight defendants in total had been freed, while the rest remain in prison because their sentences exceed the years they had already spent in remand. Under normal rules, prisoners in Hong Kong may be considered for early release after serving two-thirds of their term. But under Article 23—a locally passed security law that reinforced the NSL’s repressive framework—the authorities can override that safeguard in national security cases, a practice Amnesty International has already documented in other prosecutions.
For Hong Kong—aka China’s “Special Administrative Region”—the grim reality under the NSL is that the process has become the punishment.
A familiar phrase in Britain, of course, where we’re fed a steady diet of highly clickable, instantly monetizable culture-war talking points about “two-tier” justice, Starmer’s “Stasi”, and the Labour government’s “political prisoners”. But 6,000 miles away in our former colony, there’s no cosplaying these things for tuppence ha’penny and a few extra followers. What you’re faced with is the real deal—the hard edge of a cancel culture that breaks bodies and minds.
Compared to the UK, what you’re faced with in China is the real deal—the hard edge of a cancel culture that breaks bodies and minds.
Jimmy Lai is an extraordinarily brave man, and he deserves the attention and respect of anyone who believes in the importance of freedom of expression and a free press. Yet at age 77, and with his health failing, there is now the very real prospect that—“guilty” or not—he may never walk free again.
