President Donald Trump said the Chinese regime harbors a deep hostility toward Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy campaigner imprisoned in Hong Kong, a sentiment he suggested may complicate the efforts to secure the former publisher’s release.
“Jimmy Lai’s a little bit of a different story,” Trump said in a phone interview on Thursday with Salem News Channel, when asked about whether Chinese espionage operations against the United States and its citizens could give him leverage to free Lai.
Trump said he has spoken to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping about Lai’s case “at length.”
“I don’t know Jimmy Lai, but I know the whole story. And there’s a great level of hatred there,” Trump said, referring to the Chinese leadership’s attitude toward Lai.
“President Xi explained what happened with Hong Kong, and … the whole thing that Jimmy Lai was the leader, and it caused them tremendous distress,” Trump added.
A vocal critic of the CCP, Lai has been kept in a Hong Kong jail cell for more than five years.
Founder of the now-defunct local newspaper Apple Daily, Lai is among the first pro-democracy advocates arrested under the draconian national security law Beijing imposed on the former British colony in June 2020 after months of pro-democracy protests.
In February, a Hong Kong court sentenced 78-year-old Lai to 20 years in prison, a penalty the then UK foreign secretary denounced as “tantamount to a life sentence.”
The penalty sparked global condemnation over the CCP’s assault on Hong Kong’s dwindling freedoms, which Beijing promised to keep untouched for half a century after taking over the city from Britain in 1997.
Trump is expected to sit down with the Chinese leader again next week on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ Meeting, scheduled for Nov. 18 to Nov. 19 in Shenzhen, the southern Chinese city bordering Hong Kong.
After their September meeting in Washington, Trump said he pushed for the release of Lai and other political prisoners, including U.S. citizens whom Washington declares were wrongfully detained by China.
Trump previously secured the release of Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri, leader of China’s most prominent underground church, after bringing up Jin’s case at a bilateral summit in Beijing in May. Jin reunited with his family in the United States in July.
On Lai’s case, however, Trump took a more cautious tone.
“He’s agreed to other people. He has not agreed to Jimmy Lai,” the president said of Xi on Thursday.
Human rights groups and Lai’s family have appealed to the U.S. president to help free the Hong Kong businessman, warning that his health is deteriorating following prolonged solitary confinement.
In a recent interview with Zeteo UK political editor Shehab Khan, Lai’s son, Sebastian Lai, said his father spent more than 2,000 days in solitary confinement under “absolutely horrible” conditions.
According to Sebastien Lai, his father was kept in a cell that the son said was less than 60 square feet. Guards restricted his access to natural light, and in summer, he effectively bakes in the jail cell.
“All of these things are aimed to break him,” Sebastian Lai said. “I don’t know if he’s got two or three years left.”
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