When Beijing summoned the diplomatic representatives of Britain, the United States, Australia and the European Union this week over their countries responses to the imprisonment of Jimmy Lai, it doubtless imagined itself acting from a position of authority.
In reality, the gesture betrayed something rather different: a regime unnerved by criticism and determined to extinguish it wherever it appears.
The immediate cause was the sentencing of Jimmy Lai — the 76-year-old newspaper proprietor and long-standing critic of the Chinese Communist Party — to 20 years in prison under Hong Kong’s sweeping national security legislation. The authorities reacted furiously when Western governments described the judgment as political. Beijing’s foreign ministry office in Hong Kong declared “strong dissatisfaction” and demanded foreign governments cease “irresponsible” comments and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs.
It is a revealing phrase: internal affairs. For China’s leadership, the imprisonment of a publisher is no different from a tariff dispute or a border adjustment — a matter beyond moral scrutiny. Yet this is precisely what the West must refuse to accept.
Jimmy Lai’s true offence was not espionage, nor violence, nor subversion. It was publishing a newspaper.
For decades, Hong Kong represented a peculiar but successful compromise between East and West: a Chinese city operating under British-inspired institutions of law, commerce and, crucially, press freedom. Beijing promised to preserve this arrangement after the 1997 handover under the formula “one country, two systems.” Today that promise lies in ruins.
The national security law has transformed Hong Kong from a noisy commercial metropolis into a place where dissent is treated as treason. Newspapers have closed, journalists arrested, opposition politicians imprisoned or exiled. Apple Daily, Lai’s paper, was shuttered after police raids and the freezing of its assets. The message could not be clearer: the press may exist, but only if it agrees.
China’s furious reaction to diplomatic criticism therefore carries a heavy irony. The Communist Party insists that Western governments must respect “rule of law” in Hong Kong. Yet what exists is law stripped of its essential purpose. A legal system that punishes opinion is not the rule of law but rule by law — legislation used as an instrument of political control.
Here lies the deeper problem. China’s leaders do not merely reject Western criticisms; they genuinely struggle to comprehend them. The concepts of a free press or free speech are not, in their view, fundamental rights. They are destabilising forces. A journalist independent of the state is not a safeguard but a threat.
This is not unique to China. Every communist regime in modern history — from the Soviet Union to Mao’s Cultural Revolution — has regarded information as a weapon to be monopolised. Newspapers inform citizens; therefore newspapers must belong to the Party. Debate produces disagreement; therefore debate must be suppressed. In such systems, criticism is not civic participation but rebellion.
From that perspective, Western statements about Jimmy Lai appear almost incomprehensible. Why would foreign governments defend a publisher unless he were an agent? Why insist on open criticism unless it masks subversion? The ideological divide is therefore not merely political but philosophical. Liberal societies regard speech as a right; authoritarian systems regard it as a privilege granted by the state.
And so Beijing lashes out diplomatically — not because the criticism is powerful, but because it is intolerable.
The danger now lies not in China’s anger but in Western hesitation. Too often governments temper their words for fear of offending a major trading partner. Economic dependence encourages diplomatic caution; caution becomes silence; silence becomes complicity.
That temptation must be resisted.
The West should not apologise for defending a jailed publisher. It should intensify its criticism. Beijing’s rebuke is not a reason for retreat but evidence of necessity. If free nations accept that imprisonment for journalism is an “internal matter,” then the idea of universal human rights becomes meaningless.
Nor is this solely about Hong Kong. The city has become a test case. If China can dismantle liberties it once guaranteed by treaty, then international agreements themselves are weakened. When a government punishes peaceful speech and insists outsiders have no standing to object, it is effectively declaring that sovereignty nullifies morality.
Democratic states cannot accept that proposition. Their entire post-war order rests on the opposite principle: that certain rights transcend borders.
The appropriate response is therefore firmness, not diplomatic embarrassment. Public condemnation, coordinated sanctions, and sustained attention to political prisoners would signal that the issue will not fade from view. Authoritarian governments often rely on time and distraction; they hope outrage dissipates. It should not.
Jimmy Lai is an elderly man who will likely spend his remaining years behind bars. But his fate matters beyond his person. He symbolises whether words may exist independently of power.
Beijing believes criticism from abroad is interference. In truth, it is solidarity — solidarity with the simple notion that a newspaper editor should not die in prison for publishing opinions.
The West must say so plainly and repeatedly. Not because it seeks confrontation with China, but because without that insistence the idea of freedom itself becomes negotiable.
And freedom, once negotiable, rarely survives.
Main Image: – https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1186780385121918976
