Police stand guard outside the West Kowloon Magistrates' Courts in Hong Kong, on Nov. 20.Chan Long Hei/The Associated Press
More than 90 days into a marathon national security trial, Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai took to the stand Wednesday to give an impassioned defence of himself and his now-shuttered newspaper, Apple Daily.
Prosecutors have tried to paint Mr. Lai as the architect of widespread anti-government protests that rocked Hong Kong in 2019, and accused him of leading a campaign to get foreign governments to sanction Hong Kong and Chinese officials.
His prosecution has been widely criticized in the West as emblematic of the post-2020 crackdown on political and press freedoms in Hong Kong. This week, more than 100 parliamentarians from 24 countries signed a letter demanding his release.
He has pleaded not guilty to charges of sedition and conspiracy to collude with foreign forces. If convicted, the 76-year-old could face up to life in prison.
A Catholic convert with strong ties to the U.S. religious right, during the first Donald Trump administration Mr. Lai met with then vice-president Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He was also friendly with conservative politicians in Britain, including former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten, and with figures across the political spectrum in Taiwan, where Apple Daily also operated.
Testifying Wednesday, Mr. Lai denied ever having used these connections to try to shape policy toward Hong Kong or China, saying he merely encouraged foreign politicians to speak out in support of democracy in Hong Kong.
Asked about a meeting in July, 2019, with Mr. Pence, Mr. Lai replied: “How could I ask the vice-president to do something? This is beyond me.”
While much of the case against Mr. Lai has been brought under the 2020 national security law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing to crush the protest movement that began a year earlier, he also faces charges under a colonial-era sedition law with relation to various articles published by Apple Daily during the unrest.
Much of Wednesday’s hearing involved Mr. Lai’s lawyer, Steven Kwan, going through a diagram created by the prosecution of Mr. Lai’s alleged foreign links, and asking him to detail how and for how long he knew a given person – if indeed he did.
“I’ve never heard of him, and I don’t speak Japanese,” Mr. Lai said, when asked about Shiori Yamao, a Japanese lawmaker and member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, who has been named by prosecutors as a “co-conspirator.” Mr. Kwan had to intervene to point out that Ms. Yamao is, in fact, a woman, prompting Mr. Lai to laugh.
The tycoon also denied any acquaintance with another alleged co-conspirator, the financier Bill Browder, founder of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, which lobbies for sanctions against foreign officials responsible for human rights abuses.
Mr. Lai has also been accused of “orchestrating a conspiracy” through the “Fight for Freedom, Stand With Hong Kong” lobbying group, which paid for ads in various media around the world – including The Globe and Mail – during the 2019 protests, calling for international action in support of the pro-democracy movement.
Earlier this year, Andy Li, one of the architects of that campaign and now a key prosecution witness, took the stand. Mr. Li’s testimony made clear the campaign was well under way before the tycoon got involved, noting Mr. Lai’s help was mainly to provide loans while crowdfunding payments were being processed.
On Wednesday, Mr. Lai said he was “never connected with Stand With Hong Kong,” adding his companies had only helped “them to bridge their advertising money.”
At the beginning of his testimony Wednesday, Mr. Lai described how he had gone into the media business after the June 4, 1989, massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing, because “I thought it was a good opportunity for somebody like me, a businessman who had made some money,” to give back.
He said he wanted to “participate in delivering some information, which is freedom,” adding “the more information you have, the more you are in the know, the more you are free.”
Mr. Lai said Apple Daily reflected the core values of most Hong Kongers, “the rule of law, freedom, pursuit of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly.”
While primarily a celebrity-focused tabloid, Apple Daily always took a strong stance on democracy and issues such as the Tiananmen Massacre, supporting the annual candlelit vigils once iconic of Hong Kong. Long before 2019, Mr. Lai was a figure of loathing for many Chinese and Hong Kong officials, who blamed his media companies for riling up anti-government sentiment in the former British colony.
At the height of the unrest, Chinese state media accused Mr. Lai of being one of a “Gang of Four” leading the movement, but what was notable was just how little sway traditional pro-democracy lawmakers and opposition figures had over the leaderless, often unpredictable movement.
Apple Daily rallied readers to take to the streets, but Mr. Lai said he “always opposed violence in any form.”
If Apple Daily had a constituency, it was the older, peaceful marchers who thronged the streets early in the unrest, not the black-clad young people throwing Molotov cocktails, many of whom saw figures like Mr. Lai as out of touch.
Mr. Lai’s testimony came a day after a hearing in which 45 leading opposition figures – among them former elected lawmakers, trade unionists and activists – were sentenced to between four and 10 years in prison in the largest trial brought under the China-imposed national security law.
Their jailing was also denounced by Western governments, overseas Hong Kong organizations and rights groups. In a statement, Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said Ottawa was “deeply concerned” by the case, which centred on a primary election in 2020 designed to give pro-democracy politicians the best chance of winning a majority in Hong Kong’s semi-democratic legislature.