If Beijing wants to buy itself some easy international love, and slow the now-inevitable winding down of Hong Kong as a huge source of profit, it couldn’t do better than tell its goons now running the island city to ease up — starting with mercy for Jimmy Lai.
The show trial of Lai, 75, for supposed national-security crimes was to start last week, Sept. 25, but Hong Kong authorities already kicked it back to December. If it happens, the result is predetermined.
Lai is a hero of freedom, having founded and for decades published Apple Daily, a newspaper central to the pro-democracy movement. He’s already spent 1,000 days in prison, currently on a trumped-up fraud case. Another kangaroo-court conviction would make it near-certain that he dies behind bars.
Beijing’s crackdown has already proved that the rule of law is dead in Hong Kong, replaced by the whims of the Chinese Communist Party. Continuing to prosecute Jimmy Lai will only nail that message home.
But that won’t do much more to cow Hong Kongers: The island’s already subdued — several mainland cities are now more restive, still furious at the prolonged, repeated lockdowns imposed in a totally backfired drive to polish President Xi Jinping’s image as a wise leader.
But continued barbarism — like Hong Kong authorities’ outrageous announcement of huge bounties for helping to kidnap eight exiled critics of the regime — will further undermine China’s already-ailing economy.
Hong Kong remains vital to China’s trade with the outside world, as a “halfway house” where foreign businesses still have some hope that contracts won’t be arbitrarily ignored and that foreigners who steer clear of politics remain fairly safe from arbitrary arrest and harassment.
But those hopes are steadily dying as the goons running the city keep up the crackdown, steadily making Hong Kong no different from the mainland.
Indeed, Hong Kong authorities look even more eager than regular Communist functionaries to “send a message.”
Creating some legal pretext for releasing Lai won’t fool anyone into thinking Hong Kong’s ultimate course has changed — nor that Lai will ever stop standing for freedom.
But it would suggest that Beijing has stopped rushing to erase every vestige of what the city once was — and feed the optimism of the many foreigners eager to believe that Xi isn’t willing to destroy China’s economy in order to cement his own power and utterly totalitarian rule.
Letting his Hong Kong minions finish the martyrdom of Jimmy Lai, by contrast, will tell even the most useful idiots to get while the getting’s still good.