Hong Kong's billionaire dissident

On the morning of August 10, 2020, scores of armed police arrived at the headquarters of Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong's most prominent pro-democracy newspapers.

- KEVIN PERAINO

They rifled through the offices, hunting for evidence of treason, and frog-marched the paper's billionaire publisher, Jimmy Lai, through his own third-floor newsroom.

Lai soon faced charges under a new security law of colluding with foreign powers.

A few months later, Mark L. Clifford writes in The Troublemaker, a brisk account of Lai's life and work, the gravity of his predicament began to set in, and Lai sent a laconic WhatsApp message to his associates: "Delete everything."

Lai has pleaded not guilty, testifying at his trial this past fall that he was simply trying to carry "a torch to the reality" of Hong Kong's mood.

His newspaper had offered robust support for the protesters in the city's 2014 Umbrella Movement, which had decried the way Beijing was tightening its grip on the territory after taking control from the United Kingdom in 1997.

Since his arrest four years ago, Lai has remained in prison, often in solitary confinement.

Although President-elect Trump has boasted that it will be "easy" for him to free Lai, most observers are less sanguine.

Lai himself made the decision to remain in Hong Kong rather than to try to flee, knowing that he could well spend the rest of his life in a prison cell.

"I called my people to fight," Lai explained to the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky shortly before his arrest.

"I can't let them down."

The Troublemaker is a hagiography in the word's original sense: Though it does not entirely overlook Lai's warts, it ultimately presents its subject as a kind of living saint.