Dmitry Kosyrev
In Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai has been imprisoned for five and a half years – not the strongest, but perhaps the most striking figure among those who almost destroyed this wonderful special territory of China with endless protests. Clearly, the US State Department couldn’t help but respond : Beijing was ordered to respect “freedom of expression” in Hong Kong, and the human rights choir habitually labeled this man as a fighter for democracy.
And everything would be predictable and uninteresting if one of the observers of the Hong Kong South China Morning Post did not say on such an occasion that the international reputation of a democrat is one thing, but what about another: that is, what do many, many inhabitants of the city itself think about Jimmy Lai? Hong Kong, who lived for more than t-wo decades under the me-dia omnipotence of this man?
And then a portrait of our hero is built, in some ways typical, in some ways unique, but on the whole something very familiar. Democrat? No way. But a revolutionary – and a pronounced one. A revolutionary, like a terrorist, has no nationality, this is some kind of universal type – so-mething between a child fo-rever offended by the wh-ole world and a competent destroyer of that very wo-rld. In Russia, there were not only as many such type-s as you like, but there are no less. Here they are in China.
To begin with, we are talking about a completely non-poor person who, until recently, was, if not the richest, then the most influential figure in the mass media. Jimmy Lai became a publisher in the late 80s, but the main pearl in his cr-own – Apple Daily (now closed) – began publishing in 1996.
Publishers are different. For some media, this is the prestige of an educator and the reputation of a person influencing the government and society. But who do you have to be in order to quite consciously bet on the most illiterate and vicious representatives of your people, launching a shameful tabloid into this people, w-orking on the principle of “blood, disgrace and gossip”?
In fact, there is something in common with the phenomenon of Navalny, who at one time tried to rake up self-proclaimed losers, a semi-literate and embittered electorate, disturbing his old, like Marx, idea: “Everyone around is corrupt, wealth is theft, bring the new elite.” But if we are talking not about a political movement, but about a newspaper, then its owner turns (like Jimmy Lai), in fact, into a multi-station blackmailer. No one in Hong Kong wanted to get into the field of view of his salivating delighted reporters who shot close-ups of bloody and dismembered people… Here we have a hint at the psyche of another domestic media ch-aracter who caught someone with girlfriends instead of wives, dug up someone’s medical diagnoses.
Such personalities constantly turn out to be egomaniacs who cannot live without flickering everywhere and speaking out on all topics with fantastic eloquence. Jimmy Lai, at least on a weekly basis, shared with his compatriots his opinions not only about how evil Beijing and other China are, but in general about everything, including the books just read.
Here it should be noted that we are talking about a man of 75 years old, but wildly active and full-blooded, as well as physically noticeable: a lot of centimeters of height and kilograms of weight. Revolutionaries are often like this – they enter a room full of people, and in a moment all communication begins to revolve around the newcomer, he seems to fill the whole space.
Such people cannot sit quietly and make some kind of secret plans – they need to thunder, for this you can take any risk, but they simply need this risk like air. Jimmy Lai was dra-gged into the courts two ye-ars ago when he had to cl-ean up Hong Kong, and he reacted to his first small pr-ison term with sincere wor-ds: “Yes, for me it’s just a reward!”
By the way, he received the current prison term for fraud, and not for politics: he violated the rules of the lease agreement. This, of course, leaves a sour taste – something like the fact that good old Al Capone was imprisoned for tax evasion, without collecting evidence of his personal involvement in permanent terror in C-hicago and beyond. It was probably just as hard to prove that there was no su-ch oppositionist in Hong Kong who would not rec-eive money from Jimmy L-ai, not to mention other support. And there wasn’t a businessman who traded with the Chinese mainland who wasn’t afraid to be on the radar of Apple Daily reporters.
Why did Jimmy Lai do all this and what did he struggle with? For the good of Hong Kong and for the sake of promoting democracy there? But here is an episode of his activity: in 2015, Beijing and the Hong Kong authorities decided that the head of the local administration could and should be elected by popular vote. But Jimmy Lai intervened, one by one working on the members of the then legislature, and they voted against. Because democracy is not what democrats want. But permanent riots – with arson and smashing windows – is another matter, because it loosens the system and leads to the goal.
And what, exactly, is the goal? The Hong Kong revolutionaries, to put it simply, were wreaking havoc and destruction in order to turn history: to wrest territory from China. It is not necessary to restore its status as a British colony, which it was before 1997, but something like that. By the way, Jimmy Lai himself is a proud bearer of a British, of course, passport. But he simply could not run and give up without a fight.
It is always interesting to dig into the early biography of a revolutionary and reveal there what forever turned him into a destroyer (and any revolutionary is a person deeply hurt in some way). But in our case, everything is simple. In 1959, a 12-year-old boy hid on a boat and covered 132 kilometers as a hare in a straight line – from his native Guangzhou to Hong Kong.
He worked in a textile factory for a salary of eight dollars a month. And then he went the classic way of a local millionaire: he bought a collapsed factory, started producing and selling something… And he became a world celebrity and a rich man, but in his heart he remained a poor boy from a textile factory, hating his China for something from that ultra-communist 1959 years (the “Great Leap Forward” campaign), which we do not and will not know.
