S8 Ep270: THE FACTORY GUY Colleague Mark Clifford, The Troublemaker. By 1975, Jimmy Lai had risen from a child laborer to a factory owner, purchasing a bankrupt garment facility using stock market profits. Despite being a primary school dropout who learned English

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 3 January 2026

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

THE FACTORY GUY Colleague Mark Clifford, The Troublemaker. By 1975, Jimmy Lai had risen from a child laborer to a factory owner, purchasing a bankrupt garment facility using stock market profits. Despite being a primary school dropout who learned English from a dictionary, Lai succeeded through relentless work and charm. He capitalized on the boom in American retail sourcing, winning orders from Kmart by producing samples overnight and eventually building Comitex into a leading sweater manufacturer, embodying the Hong Kong dream. NUMBER 10
1992 HK

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm John Batch from visiting with the author and publisher and editor Mark Clifford, whose new book is The Troublemaker,
0:08.7	how Jimmy Lai became a billionaire, Hong Kong's greatest dissident, and China's most fierce critic.
0:14.0	It's 1975.
0:16.2	This is a moment when Jimmy says, I've worked enough.
0:20.0	I know how to run a factory. Let's buy one. He's done well on the Chinese, on the Hong Kong stock market, which is now obligingly crashed, as markets tend to do. But that's made purchasing a factory available to people with capital, but not a whole lot. He has a partner, Lang Jirang, and they find what you'd have to say with some creative
0:45.1	thinking, a factory that they can turn into a copycat factory.
0:50.2	What is that, Mark?
0:51.8	Yeah, well, he's hoping to, basically, he's hoping to steal customers from his last business and produce the same kind of fashions, whether it's a sweater or a shirt. He's mostly doing nits, sweaters, as the previous place. It didn't really work out like that. He couldn't, it proved harder to steal customers than he thought because the customer said, hey, the old place is good.
1:11.4	We don't know if you can deliver. We might give you some money and then you're going to make
1:15.5	shoddy sweaters for us and then where are we? So it was a real struggle for him in the first year or so.
1:23.2	And the struggle led to Jimmy's personality winning through.
1:29.2	Our emphasis here, this is not a man who spends a lot of time contemplating.
1:34.7	This is a man who likes to meet people and dine, especially everywhere.
1:39.4	He will become a great Gourmand, but right now he has to meet buyers.
1:43.9	Who are they, Mark?
1:45.0	And what is the miracle?
1:47.2	Yeah, they're coming from American retailers, above all.
1:50.7	The American retail market was just exploding in the 50s, 60s, and we're up to the 70s now, as you say.
1:58.3	People, you know, retailers that are mostly out of business these days,
2:02.0	Kmart, Sears, J.C. Penny were huge forces in the global textile industry at the time.
2:08.6	And they were just discovering the merits of sourcing in Asia.
2:12.2	They'd been in Japan for a bit. Japan, Japanese prices were going up.
	...

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