This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor. The Troublemaker, how Jimmy Lai 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 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, great to be on the show.

Jimmy's dad was, had married into a prosperous shipping family in, as you say, Pearl River Delta,

near what we used to call Canton, Guangzhou.

...