This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

This is CBS I on the World. I'm John Batchelor.

The Troublemaker, how Jimmy Lye became a billionaire, Hong Kong's greatest dissident, and China's most feared critic.

I welcome the author and publisher and editor Mark Clifford, who takes us into the world of China during and right after the revolution.

And the birth of a man we now remember is Jimmy Lai.

At the time, he's born in the Pearl River Basin.

You've heard of that often because that is the centerpiece of China's transformation

from a desperately poor, ripped apart country at the end of the Second War

to the miracle of these last decades.

And now the troubled land once again.

I congratulate you, Mark. This is a story that is a one-man story, but it's also the story of a transformation of a whole culture, from starvation and desperation to the right now what we see is a civil rights catastrophe.

But there is another day here in the 21st century.

Jimmy Live is born, I believe I have the date right, sometime in 1948, which means...

We think it was probably 47. He doesn't really know his, you know, even the government documents are kind of all over the place. But yeah, he was born a year or two before Mao took power in China after, as you say, after World War II. And then the culmination of the Chinese civil war that saw the, saw the communist triumph and send the nationalist KMT packing to Taiwan.

The important scene for me early in your book is that dad is leaving forever.

And he picks Jimmy up and says, you're destined for great things. Who is dad? Why is he leaving?

And who's Jimmy's mother at that moment?

Good evening to you.

Yeah.

Anyway, thanks so much for interest, John.

It's great to be on the show.

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