I'm visiting with Mark Clifford, the author of the new book, The Troublemaker,

how Jimmy Lai became a billionaire Hong Kong's greatest dissident and China's most fierce critic.

This is a story of one very, very difficultly successful man and good for him.

However, it turns out to be a story of modern China, going from famine to wonder,

to capitalism, to brutality in the course of a man's lifetime, one man's lifetime. It is now

2020. The COVID hits, and they raid Apple Daily.

Jimmy, by the end of the year, is jailed.

It's hard to separate those things, Mark.

It's as if the COVID gave China permission to do what they had held back from,

which is to expose their brutality.

Is that the way to think of it?

That's certainly one way to think of it.

It's kind of paraphrasing Voltaire, if COVID didn't exist, they would have had to invent it.

I mean, they needed, this was such a convenient excuse.

And for example, it was COVID restrictions that allowed them to outlaw the June 4th Tiananmen commemoration.

That it happened every year.

In 2019, there was something like 160,000 people there.

I was one of 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,

they accused him of incitement to riot, and they jailed him on that charge. So that's how far Hong Kong fell in that single year. April of 21, he sentenced to 14 months, May of 21.

...