I'm John Batsu with my good colleague Joseph Sternberg. He's in London. He writes political

economics for the Wall Street Journal editorial page where he's a member of the editorial board. For many

years, Joseph was in Hong Kong covering East Asia, the rise of the Chinese miracle, which perhaps is over.

But part of the Chinese miracle was always the threat of brutality.

That has been visited upon a man named Jimmy Lai, who published Apple Daily, a newspaper in

Hong Kong that was popular.

And part of its popularity was it dissented from the brutality of the mainland.

Jimmy Lye is in jail, has been for five years, and is now reported convicted of charges that are

too absurd to state. He dissented. That's his crime. He is a Kingdom of United Kingdom citizen. What is to be done? Is there a solution,

Joe? Does Mr. Starrmer speak of it? John, I think that this case is incredibly distressing for a bunch

of reasons. I mean, one of which is that Jimmy Lai himself is a decent man who does not

deserve to have been imprisoned for the past five years for wanting the best for Hong Kong,

his home, and the people who live there, and for the quote-unquote crime of expecting Beijing to live

by the promises that China made to the United Kingdom as a condition of the return of Hong Kong

to Chinese sovereignty. So, I mean, first off, you have this personal element. This is enormously distressing and, you know, sorrowful for Jimmy Lai and his family.

And, you know, his health is a bit of an issue and he's getting older.

And so I think that it's just awful that the Chinese government is doing this.

I mean, as you point out, this is a particular embarrassment for the British government twice over,

partly because Jimmy Lai is a British citizen.

That ought to mean something.

And yet you often get the impression that the Trump administration is being more proactive about trying to apply

some pressure to Xi Jinping in Beijing to devise some means of getting Jimmy Lai out of J-Haul.

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