They're Now Arresting People for Selling Books About Jimmy Lai
This week, Hong Kong police arrested independent bookseller Pong Yat-ming and three of his staff on suspicion of selling “seditious” publications. Among the titles seized from his shop, Book Punch, was The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic by Mark Clifford.
Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison last month. Now you can be arrested for selling a book about him. First they jailed the newspaper publisher. Then they came for the booksellers.
Mark Clifford, who is based in New York, responded to reporters by observing that if the reports were true, it was a sad and ironic commentary, that selling a book about a man imprisoned for promoting free expression would itself be treated as sedition.
He’s right. And that irony should sharpen our attention, not dull it.
Last year, I had the privilege of speaking with Mark on Acton Line about his book and about the remarkable life he chronicles. Hong Kong has scores of billionaires, but only one of them dared to stand up to China while the city’s freedoms were being systematically dismantled. What in Jimmy Lai’s extraordinary life explains such courage?
The answer begins, as so many great stories do, with nothing. Lai arrived in Hong Kong as a penniless boy who had fled mainland China. He built a garment empire, then a media empire, most notably Apple Daily, the scrappy pro-democracy tabloid that became a thorn in Beijing’s side for decades. He could have enjoyed his fortune in comfortable silence. Instead, he used it to speak.
Lai’s story is not merely political. It is deeply personal and, ultimately, spiritual. His conversion to Catholicism gave shape and depth to convictions that were already forming: that human dignity demands freedom, and that freedom demands witnesses willing to suffer for it. As Mark and I discussed, Lai understood that what was happening in Hong Kong was not just a local affair. It was a test case for whether authoritarianism could quietly extinguish liberty in one of the world’s most visible cities.
The Chinese Communist Party’s answer has been emphatic. The national security law imposed in 2020, followed by the even broader “Article 23” legislation in 2024, has transformed Hong Kong’s legal landscape. Lai’s 20-year sentence in February was the heaviest penalty yet under these laws. And now the net tightens further, not just around dissidents and journalists, but around anyone who would so much as hand a customer a book about one.
I’d encourage you to listen to our full conversation. It was recorded before Lai’s sentencing, before this week’s bookshop arrests, and yet everything Mark said about the trajectory of Hong Kong has proved painfully prescient.
You can also find Mark Clifford’s work at markclifford.org and learn more about the advocacy effort through the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.
The Troublemaker is still available where books can be sold freely.
