This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Monday, May 15th, 2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Jimmy Lye is a Hong Kong entrepreneur and a media magnate, now in prison in China for publishing news and criticism amid mainland China's takeover of the island.

Jimmy Lye will be the recipient of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty this week.

Eric Cohn of the Acton Institute was a producer on the film The Hong Konger

about Jimmy Lye and his struggle for liberty in a turbulent time for Hong Kong.

We spoke last week.

Listeners will be aware that Jimmy Lye will be the recipient of the, of this year's

Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, but like his background is sort of what you would hope for for somebody who

had left China and gone to Hong Kong.

His story is of what Hong Kong made possible and the freedom that was guaranteed to people in Hong Kong made possible.

He showed up there when he was about 12 years old with really not a penny to his name,

started working in a factory, and then through his industriousness and

entrepreneurial spirit, built a clothing business called Giordano which spread throughout Asia and then started

Next Media which published Next magazine and Apple Daily which was the largest

circulated newspaper in Hong Kong and really the only Chinese language

paper that was in favor of democracy and human rights.

What there was a point at which he decided entrepreneurship is great. I am a wealthy man, but I'm a newspaper man now.

And what went into that?

Really it was Tiananmen Square that changed him.

He looked at what was happening in Tiananmen and one of the important things to understand about that protest movement is what we think about Tiananmen it was happening all throughout mainland China and the clamp down that the Chinese Communist Party did on the protesters in Tiananmen really changed Jimmy's point of view.

He'd been pretty hopeful up till then that the kind of freedom that he experienced in Hong Kong

was going to spread throughout the mainland and

...