What’s the greater priority: universal human rights or sovereign rights? What rights, if any, are truly universal? How far should other nations go to challenge a sovereign power who is taking such rights away from residents within their boundaries?
After the horrors of the world wars, the United Nations marked in 1948 its “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” This gave moral currency to dozens of international actions over the next 80 years. The drafting committee included philosophers from China and Lebanon, yet these are criticized by some as Eurocentric. Overreach under the UDHR banner complicated its message, and gave authoritarians greater cover.
Where does that leave us? I’ve thought about that since completing “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic,” a 2024 biography written by Mark Clifford.
Lai is the impressive entrepreneur who became a primary financial backer and champion of Hong Kong’s democracy movement. He is currently in prison for organizing “illegal protests.” He’s unusual in that he has never himself sought political power, or even explicit policy goals beyond democracy and free markets.
Democracy in some form sounds like a clear good to my American upbringing and worldview. How far I personally, or my government, should go in supporting this elsewhere feels increasingly complicated to me. Encouraging more true information to let people make their own decisions is one path that has felt morally consistent to me, and that’s something Lai’s media entrepreneurship certainly pursued.
But Hong Kong’s special relationship with an authoritarian Chinese state is beyond my expertise. Lai’s life story is illuminating, and even Clifford’s flattering portrayal still leaves open questions like these. I recommend it.
My notes below for future reference:
- Jimmy Lai grew up listeneing to Voice of America
- Lai defined fast casual after his Comitex manufacturing business— he dyed white fabrics to speed response time
- Tiananmen Square turned him political
- His Next magazine innovation (launched in 1990, lasted until 2021): two separate editions in one, one more business and politics and one more entertainment
- In a column he called a party leader “a turtle egg”
- Other than Lai “businessmen put profit ahead of principle”
- Apple Daily reversed self censorship of Hong Kong papers as the Chinese control came closer
- Lai’s Apple Daily paid for a politician’s Shenzen orgy, was notorious for ambulance chasing, and its street prostitution reviews
- He met and developed a relationship with Milton and Rose Friedman
- Jimmy lai bankrolled Hong Kong pro democracy movement: for the 2003 street protests, he personally paid for ads and materials
- He was Catholic which is also anti communist in its own way
- Jimmy had the idea for Apple Daily to animate news events when Hong Kong police moved to closed circuit radio so they couldn’t get to crime scenes
- In 2000, democracy won in Taiwan and Jimmy moved there — for freedom and Chinese culture
- National security law
- Hong Kong gets its model from the Opium Wars and uk colonialism
- Herbert Chow the only other prominent Hong Kong business person speaking out for democratic protests
- Similar questions to Navalny: why not flee especially with a British passport? To stand for something, he argues
- Lai’s task now, “he must survive with dignity”
- Unusual that he doesn’t want political power or even many particular policies other than democracy and free markets