As Jimmy Lai spent his 1,197th day in prison on Nov. 20, his “right-hand man” Mark Simon told Hillsdale faculty why the Hong Kong dissident refused to escape the country before his arrest.
“Somebody said to him, ‘Jimmy, why won’t you leave?’” Simon said. “He said, ‘I don’t want my kids to think that for 25 years I drove this thing, pushed this thing along and then all of a sudden, when times get tough, I leave thousands of people in jail.’ He said, ‘I’ve had a good life.’”
Before his August 2020 arrest, the pro-democracy activist and media tycoon was publisher of Apple Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper shut down by Beijing in 2021. Simon was one of his top advisers and a senior executive at Apple Daily.
“It’s a blur because this person would be picked up and that person would be questioned,” Simon said. “Three or four hundred cops at least came out to Apple Daily. Jimmy was arrested and paraded around the newsroom in handcuffs.”
Simon met with faculty in a private luncheon in the Dow Hotel and Conference Center, sat down with College President Larry Arnn, and spoke to students at the Alexander Hamilton Society.
Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Cella ’91, who accompanied Simon during his visit to campus, said there was “no better place” than Hillsdale to tell Lai’s story.
“It was a very frank discussion of Mr. Lai’s storybook journey from mainland China as a young man to the once-free shores of Hong Kong,” Cella said, “and how he prospered and was drawn into the cause of freedom and human rights, beginning with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.”
Simon said he wanted to visit Hillsdale both because he was curious about the college and interested in sparking a discussion on the classical view of human rights.
“Is there an opportunity at a place like Hillsdale to have a discussion on human rights based on a deeper understanding of morality?” Simon said. “Based on the type of curriculum and the type of education that comes to people from Hillsdale.”
Gary Wolfram, chair of the economics and business department, said Simon’s visit was “a feather in the college’s cap.”
“Jimmy Lai is a symbol of the battle between a system of individual liberty and market capitalism and communism,” Wolfram said. “It was interesting to hear about Hong Kong and Jimmy Lai’s imprisonment from someone who is directly involved and who knows him personally.”
Apple Daily was heavily critical of Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party. Simon said he and Lai had physical confrontations with the CCP and Triads, a Chinese transnational organized crime syndicate.
When Lai was facing a murder threat in Taiwan, Simon said he slept with a baseball bat in a van for two nights where Lai was staying.
“We showed up and there were two security guards there who were older than my father,” Simon said. “Taiwan, fortunately, is a baseball place, so myself and another guy got baseball bats and slept outside of his house for two nights at different times just to make sure.”
Lai is currently awaiting a December trial on national security charges that could keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
Simon said he expects Lai will be found guilty, but says there is a “50-50 chance” the trial will be postponed, as it has been before.
“The reason why they’ll kick it is because it’d be a 75-day trial,” Simon said. “If you’re the Chinese and Hong Kong Government, do you want the spotlight on you for 75 days, or would you rather just kick it?”
