From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

This is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal.

If you're not already subscribing, please do sign up to Free Expression wherever you do your podcast listening.

This week, as Americans rage over the state and future

of our democracy and apparent threats to our freedoms, we're going to reflect a little on what

real tyranny looks like under Chinese communist rule. As tensions continue to rise between the

US and China, we're taking a close look at the enormous human stakes involved in the struggle

for global supremacy. Hong Kong was

handed over to the Chinese by the British in 1997. The city colony had been something quite

unique in the vast Chinese space, a thriving economic powerhouse built on free market

capitalism and individual liberties. When the People's Republic took over, it promised in an international treaty

to maintain those freedoms for 50 years. But in less than half that time, under President Xi Jinping,

China's reneged on that promise, steadily enforcing a climate of repression. In 2020, Beijing

implemented a new national security law that severely limited freedom of speech. In effect,

anyone criticizing the Chinese regime could find themselves incarcerated. A man who's become the human face of suffering under this

Chinese rule in Hong Kong is Jimmy Lai. Lai came to Hong Kong as a young boy fleeing tyranny on the

mainland. Like many Hong Kongers, through his entrepreneurial genius and

sheer hard work, he built a hugely successful business empire. But he also understood and

cherished Hong Kong's freedoms, and he saw the threats that the communists on the mainland

would always pose to those freedoms. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989,

...