Jimmy Lai's trial: Insights from former HKSAR Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying

Jimmy Lai's case was prosecuted in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and was tried in Hong Kong by a Hong Kong court, with a quorum of three senior Hong Kong judges. It is a manifestation of "One Country, Two Systems," a principle allowing Hong Kong as part of China its separate legal and judicial system, said former Chief Executive of the HKSAR Leung Chun-ying recently.

It is Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong, with the judges being Hong Kong permanent residents with a high degree of autonomy. Namely Hong Kong has been entrusted by the country with protecting the national security of China as a whole, Leung said in an interview, adding that if anyone who wants a most recent and high-profile example of how Hong Kong applies the "One Country, Two Systems" principle, they need look no further than the Jimmy Lai National Security Law case.

"I think we should really reflect on not just the case itself, the trial itself and the judgment, and very soon we'll know the sentencing, not just these legal and judicial processes, but the entire political environment both in Hong Kong and also outside of Hong Kong. We should get a better understanding of what happened politically, as well in Hong Kong. Jimmy Lai simply did not fall from the sky and land in Hong Kong with all the power that he had to wield. There was a process," Leung said.

Somehow Jimmy Lai was allowed to become what he became and wreak such havoc on Hong Kong, Leung said, adding that Lai's newspapers were used as teaching materials in primary and secondary schools.  

"So all these are the things that we need to look at, we should also reflect on, for example, when it comes to the question of giving our children proper education like the results of the last LegCo election, amongst the 28 functional constituencies, the education constituency had the third lowest voter turnout," he said.

And before we rectified the LegCo election system, for all the elections since 1985 when we had the first LegCo election under British rule, all the Legislative Council members returned by these functional constituency elections where the electors were members of the education sector; teachers, headmasters, headmistresses etc., were not just the opposition but the radical end of the opposition starting from people like Szeto Wah, he added.

"So these are the things we should look at, we should reflect on Hong Kong as a society can be forgetful. We can focus for a few days on the Jimmy Lai case and then we move on to other things. But I think we should stay on not just the Jimmy Lai case, but also Jimmy Lai person, the Jimmy Lai ring of people where he was the ringleader and ask ourselves how did it happen."

According to a verdict handed down by the High Court of the HKSAR on Monday, Lai was found guilty on two charges of conspiring to collude with external forces and one charge of conspiracy to publish seditious materials.

A large amount of evidence presented during the trial proved that Lai had been a mastermind behind and played a major part in the anti-China riots that erupted in Hong Kong in 2019. He had long colluded with other senior executives of Apple Daily to continuously publish seditious articles, launched the "One Hongkonger, One Letter to Save Hong Kong" campaign, conducted interviews with foreign politicians and held other related activities, openly demanding that the United States, the United Kingdom and EU countries sanction China and the Hong Kong SAR.

Leung also talked about the harm Lai caused to Hong Kong's youth, saying that the Apple Daily deployed engaging and innovative strategies for spreading its insidious messages to the public, particularly the electronic version of the newspaper, targeting not just secondary but also senior primary students.

"It had a large circulation so it was influential. Political science is science. There is a scientific correlation between cause and effect. For what happened to Hong Kong in 2019, The Black Riots. I think there are reasons that we can put together to explain the phenomena. It just didn't simply happen. We want to make sure that we can guard against such things from happening again," he noted.

When asked about his opinion about whether Jimmy Lai is an ordinary media boss, Leung said, "We did not know until Jimmy Lai was arrested, that he had a British passport, and then after he was arrested, he claimed that he was a British citizen, and his family and legal representatives have been urging the British government to intervene in the independent judicial process of his trial."

"Now if he is British, which we didn't know before he was arrested, somehow he was hiding this from the Hong Kong and international public. What was a foreigner doing in Hong Kong politics? What was a foreigner doing in Hong Kong to promote democracy in Hong Kong?" he said.

"Now, obviously there is something behind what he was doing. If we put the boot on the other foot, I'm sure the British government, and for that matter any other government in the world, including the U.S. government, would not allow, firstly a foreign national to own such a large media organisation," Leung noted.

"They would not allow the owner of this organisation to organize and lead public processions. They would not allow this foreign national to go to the U.S. government, to go to the White House. To meet with the vice-president, the national security advisor, and the secretary of state on one visit, to make requests to the U.S. government for them to intervene in Hong Kong politics."

He said these are the very basic facts about this man. A foreigner has no place meddling in another country's politics and definitely no place, as a matter of definition, in fostering so-called democracy in this other country.