Book talk: Jimmy Lai and the end of freedom in Hong Kong?

Mark L. Clifford, Jimmy Lai’s biographer, on advocating for his colleague’s freedom while Downing Street looks the other way

By Frontline Club

Event lasts 1 hour 30 minutes
As the UK government cosies up with its counterparts in Beijing, Mark L. Clifford visits London to talk about his friend and former Next Digital and Apple Daily colleague, Jimmy Lai, who has now been unjustly imprisoned in Hong Kong for more than 1,400 days on spurious national security charges. Clifford’s new biography of Lai, “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic,” tells the astonishing story of how Lai’s power, platform and pro-democracy principles came to terrify the Chinese Communist Party.

Mark Clifford wil be in conversation with Ian Williams, veteran China journalist and author of “Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy”.

Mark L. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, an NGO dedicated to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law for the people of Hong Kong. Previously, he was executive director of the Hong Kong–based Asia Business Council, and a board director at Next Digital, the Hong Kong media giant founded and majority-owned by Jimmy Lai. During his twenty-eight years in Hong Kong, he served as editor-in-chief of both English-language newspapers, the South China Morning Post and The Standard, of which he was also publisher. He held senior editorial positions at BusinessWeek and the Far Eastern Economic Review, in Hong Kong and Seoul, and lived in Asia from 1987 until 2020. He is the author of Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere.

Ian Williams is a journalist and author. His latest book, The Vampire State: the rise and fall of the Chinese economy was published in September. He was a long-time foreign correspondent in Moscow, China and the Far East for Channel 4 News and then NBC of America. He has also covered conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East and Ukraine. He won an Emmy and BAFTA awards for his discovery and reporting on the Serb detention camps during the war in Bosnia. He is the author of five books – two novels and three non-fiction. The novels Beijing Smog and Zero Days are tongue-in-cheek cyber thrillers. His non-fiction writing focusses on China: Every Breath You Take: China’s New Tyranny is a study of the surveillance state, while The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War looks at Beijing’s increasing global belligerence and was shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.