China’s Ambitions and the Fate of a Hong Kong Daily

For three decades as a journalist, author and head of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council, I was a proponent of engagement with China. My work rested on the belief that more open trade and a shared desire for economic prosperity would bind China and the world more closely together. I’d lived in and reported from South Korea during its democratic transition in the late 1980s and envisioned something similar for China’s future.

I wasn’t under any illusion that the Chinese Communist Party was teeming with incipient democrats. But I did think that hundreds of millions of newly middle-class Chinese would want political choice to go along with consumer choice. What better place to start experimenting with openness than in Hong Kong? Handed over by Britain to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the city had a strong tradition of freedom—and Britain and China had signed an international treaty promising that this tradition would be upheld.

When China entered the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001, I co-authored a book with the organization’s incoming director-general,

Supachai Panitchpakdi,

predicting that membership would catalyze a new round of growth for China. How right we were about the economic growth—more right than even the most optimistic China bulls could imagine. How wrong we were to imagine that political openness would follow.

The shattering moment came for me at the end of February 2020. One morning, at 8 a.m., I got in a taxi outside my apartment in Hong Kong. I was on my way to meet media entrepreneur and pro-democracy campaigner

Jimmy Lai,

a man I had known for three decades. Then I noticed that he had sent me an e-mail: “I’m being arrested,” he wrote, explaining that, understandably, he couldn’t meet me for breakfast.

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