China Took His City. And Now His Father.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The pro democracy movement in Hong Kong brought hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets in 2019. All of that. They demanded democracy and that China uphold the freedoms it had promised when it took back the British colony in the late nineteen nineties. For the first time since Beijing imposed a new security law on Hong Kong, police have carried out dozens of arrests and used water cannon and tear gas against protesters. China responded by arresting thousands of protesters, including the leaders of the movement, like a man named Jimmy Lai. For decades, Lai had used his wealth and his newspaper to campaign for democracy. He was a constant thorn in the side of Beijing. If I knew that I would be, you know, end up like this and be prisoners, would I have to change the way I run my life? And I realized that, no, I won't. We interviewed Lai on the show in 2020, just after he was arrested. Because I never did anything before intentionally, just naturally. So it must be my character. Now if he's my character, it's my destiny. It's my destiny. It's God's grace and mercy. So I was all relieved. Yeah. He was later found guilty of national security crimes. And earlier this month, after five years of waiting behind bars, Jimmy Lai was summoned for his sentencing hearing. And when he arrived at the courthouse, what became clear is that the movement he once helped lead had now become a shell of itself. A small group of pro democracy demonstrators had gathered outside, their faces hidden by scarves and masks for fear of being identified. They, like Lai himself, were waiting to learn his sentence. The heavy, very heavy sentence, you know, almost comically heavy sentence was expected. Twenty years? Yeah. Twenty years for his age. That's basically a life sentence. Jimmy Lai's son, Sebastian, was also waiting. I mean, by the time he gets out, if he does, he'll be 98. Given the health conditions that he's in and given the conditions that he's being kept in, I don't know if he could even serve on tenth of that sentence. He spent years trying to free his father and learned the news of his sentence from thousands of miles away in Paris. His health has deteriorated massively over the last five years. His nails are falling off. He's got heart problems. I mean, look, everybody knows someone around his age, late seventies, early eighties. And if you put a man of that age in a 60 square feet cell in solitary confinement the whole time, even if you do that for someone for a hundred days, the likelihood of that person surviving is not high, and he's been in there for a thousand eight hundred days and more. Wow. You know that number very well. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, I do. But there was a …