4/4: The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
by Mark L. Clifford (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Troublemaker-Became-Billionaire-Greatest-Dissident/dp/1668027690
Jimmy Lai escaped mainland China when he was twelve years old, at the height of a famine that killed tens of millions. In Hong Kong, he hustled and often slept overnight on a table in a clothing factory where he did odd jobs. At twenty-one, he was running a factory. By his mid-twenties, he owned one and was supplying sweaters and shirts to some of the biggest brands in the United States, from Polo to The Limited. His ideas about retail led him to create Giordano in 1981, and with it “fast fashion.” A restless entrepreneur, as Giordano prepared to go public, he was thinking about a dining concept that would disrupt Hong Kong’s fast-food industry. But then came Tiananmen Square democracy protest and the massacre of 1989.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm visiting with Mark Clifford, the author of the new book, The Troublemaker, |
| 0:09.0 | how Jimmy Lie became a billionaire Hong Kong's greatest dissident and China's most feared critic. |
| 0:14.0 | This is a story of one very, very difficultly successful man, and good for him. |
| 0:21.6 | However, it turns out to be a story of modern China, |
| 0:25.6 | going from famine to wonder, to capitalism, to brutality |
| 0:31.6 | in the course of a man's lifetime, one man's lifetime. |
| 0:34.6 | It is now 2020. |
| 0:36.6 | The COVID hits, and they raid Apple Daily. |
| 0:41.3 | Jimmy, by the end of the year, is jailed. It's hard to separate those things, Mark. It's as if |
| 0:48.6 | the COVID gave China permission to do what they had held back from, which is to expose their |
| 0:54.1 | brutality. Is that the way to think of it? That from, which is to expose their brutality. |
| 0:54.9 | Is that the way to think of it? |
| 0:56.7 | That's certainly one way to think of it. |
| 0:58.2 | It's a kind of, you know, paraphrasing Voltaire, if COVID didn't exist, they would have |
| 1:03.4 | had to invent it. |
| 1:04.4 | I mean, they needed, this was such a convenient excuse. |
| 1:07.3 | And for example, it was COVID restrictions that allowed them to outlaw the June 4th Tiananmen |
| 1:14.6 | commemoration that it happened every year. In 2019, there was something like 160,000 people there. I was one of |
| 1:22.1 | them. It was incredible. The next year, it was outlawed. Jimmy came, got out of his car, didn't talk to anyone, lit a candle, set a prayer, got back in his car. |
| 1:34.2 | They accused him of incitement to riot, and they jailed him on that charge. |
| 1:39.0 | So that's how far Hong Kong fell in that single year. |
| 1:43.0 | April of 21, he sentenced to 14 months, May of 21. |
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