The strength of Jimmy Lai and the weakness of Emperor Xi

At his summit in Beijing in May, President Trump worked to convince Chinese leader Xi Jinping to release Jimmy Lai from his imprisonment in Hong Kong.

Jimmy, whom I am honored to call a friend, is a 78-year-old diabetic who has been in solitary confinement for approximately 700 days longer than the time the United States was engaged in World War II. He is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for endangering Chinese national security.

This conviction has no more legal or moral validity than that of the Lord through Pontius Pilate. And I find it deeply moving that, in the prison cell where Jimmy draws religious scenes in colored pencil, many of them depict the Crucifixion. One of these sketches is one of my most prized possessions. By conforming in prayer to the crucified Lord, Jimmy Lai saw his unjust punishment as an opportunity for grace.

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This, however, does not change the brutal reality of his situation: namely the near certainty that he will die in prison, never having been returned to his family – unless Emperor Xi lets him go into exile.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem like a sentimental man to me, but I get the impression that he really cares about Jimmy Lai and his plight. All the more reason to wonder why, in explaining his attempt to convince Xi Jinping to let Jimmy go, the president recycled communist arguments that Jimmy was causing “chaos” — by which Chinese communists mean encouraging and participating in peaceful protests demanding that the Beijing regime honor the commitments to freedom it made when Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. This “chaos,” the president said, made Jimmy’s case a “hard case” for the Chinese communist dictator.

But is this the real reason for Xi Jinping’s intransigence so far in the Jimmy Lai affair?

For several years, informed sources have told me that Jimmy is caught in a conflict between the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese internal security mandarins in Beijing and Hong Kong.

For Foreign Office diplomats, Jimmy Lai is a problem they would like to be relieved of so that it does not keep coming up in negotiations with other powers. Thus, during Jimmy’s long show trial in 2023-2025, the Foreign Ministry was in favor of “convict and expel”: saving the repugnant national security law imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 by finding him guilty of violating it. But then deport him from Hong Kong into exile – probably to Britain, of which Jimmy is a citizen.

Security goons, meanwhile, reportedly argued that if Jimmy were exiled, it would only encourage others in Hong Kong to protest the ever-increasing repression in this once-vibrant city-state. So their reasoning is: let the 20 year sentence play out, and if that means Jimmy Lai dies in Stanley Prison, so be it.

In their twisted minds, such cruelty might be useful.

Such a debate between two factions of the Chinese communist regime can only be resolved by one man: Xi Jinping.

His refusal, so far, to resolve the issue in favor of the Foreign Office suggests the possibility that the emperor has fewer clothes than the rest of the world thinks. Either he lacks the power to resolve the dispute between cautious diplomats and the security thagocracy, or he fears that siding with the Foreign Office will jeopardize his firm grip on the internal security apparatus, at his peril.

And this, in my opinion, is why Jimmy Lai’s case is “difficult” for Xi Jinping: the nonsense that Jimmy is causing the “chaos” is a cover for the emperor’s weakness.

What can fellow Catholics do for Jimmy Lai right now? We can hold Him in prayer every day. We can urge the Trump administration to continue to press for Jimmy’s release, and we can urge our representatives and senators to pressure the administration to continue to pressure the Chinese regime.

We can urge the Bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Stephen Chow SJ, who has been notably absent throughout the Jimmy Lai drama, to remember that Catholicism’s first political prisoner is its diocesan faithful, and that this white martyr deserves all the pastoral support the Hong Kong Church can offer him as he faces the possibility of red martyrdom.

And, inspired by Jimmy Lai’s unwavering faith, we can hope that these continued intercessions and pressures will lead to his restoration to his family and the freedom that Jimmy so nobly defended because he believed it to be a religious and moral obligation.