The jailed Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai has been awarded a German free-speech prize, according to the Guardian, in a ceremony attended by members of his family and senior Bundestag figures. Lai, the founder of the now-shuttered Apple Daily, has been in detention since 2020 and on trial under Hong Kong’s National Security Law since late 2022 on charges that could carry a life sentence. He is 77, a British citizen, and one of the few remaining public figures from the 2019 protest generation whose name continues to circulate in Western political discourse. His trial has resumed intermittently with no indication of imminent verdict.
The received wisdom
The standard Western view of Lai has become, over five years, quietly apologetic. Sympathetic noises are made in the State Department briefing room; statements are issued on anniversaries; awards are given at arm’s length by civil-society institutions rather than by governments. Official London, which has a unique obligation to a British-citizen prisoner under a treaty it co-signed, has generally limited itself to consular-access requests. The implicit logic is that Hong Kong is lost, the diplomatic cost of sustained pressure exceeds the benefit, and anyway Lai’s case is complicated by the usual grey zones of late-colonial politics and the involvement of his newspaper in partisan advocacy.
This is not an irrational reading. It is, however, a corrosive one.
A different read
The German prize matters precisely because it cuts against the prevailing Western habit of treating Hong Kong as a closed file. There is a tradition in European foreign policy, stretching back through the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia, in which small acts of moral attention by Western democracies were later revealed — after the fact, when archives opened — to have mattered enormously inside the regimes they annoyed. Vaclav Havel wrote in The Power of the Powerless that the greatest gift a Western democracy could give a dissident was “to be seen” — not rescued, not lobbied for, simply registered. The Helsinki baskets worked not because they threatened Soviet power directly but because they created a discursive framework inside which Soviet officials had to keep explaining themselves. Jimmy Lai’s trial is being conducted inside a system that still, just, cares how it is described in Berlin and London. A German prize is not a rescue. It is a reminder that the describing has not stopped.
The conservative case for this kind of gesture rests on an understanding of moral capital as a strategic resource. Western liberal democracies spent most of the twentieth century accumulating such capital — through the Nuremberg trials, the Universal Declaration, the Helsinki process, the long campaign for Soviet Jewry — and have spent most of the twenty-first century expending it without replenishment. The Iraq war, the Guantánamo detentions, the drone programme, the partial embrace of the Gulf monarchies in the Abraham-Accords era, the US approval this week of $8.6 billion in arms sales to Middle East allies — each individually defensible decision has, cumulatively, reduced the credibility with which any Western government can speak about political prisoners anywhere. Germany, which has fewer of those hypocrisies in its recent ledger, is in a marginally better position to speak. It is using that position. That is what the prize means.
The parallel with today’s Russian-sphere dissidents is instructive. When the Sakharov Prize was awarded to the jailed Iranian Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, now in deteriorating health in Evin prison, or to Belarusian civil-society figures during the 2020 Minsk crackdown, the awards were dismissed in Tehran and Minsk as theatre. They were theatre. Theatre, in the Havel sense, is part of how authoritarian systems are eroded. It works slowly. It works unreliably. It is not a substitute for policy. But a conservatism that understands institutions — understands that legitimacy is itself an institution, accumulated by use — should recognise that these gestures are how a particular form of Western power is maintained.
The harder question is what London does next. The British government has a treaty interest in Lai’s case that Berlin does not. It has so far chosen to behave as though it did not. That is the posture that the German award should, with luck, make politically harder to sustain.
What to watch
Three signals. First: does any senior British minister publicly attend the follow-up ceremonies or meet Lai’s family in London? Silence will be read, correctly, in Beijing as confirmation that the treaty is dead. Second: watch the Hong Kong trial calendar. A verdict delivered after the German award will be, inescapably, a verdict delivered in reply to it. Third: the European Parliament. A Sakharov nomination for Lai would consolidate a transatlantic posture of the kind that has been missing since 2020 — and would make the question of moral capital a policy question rather than a ceremonial one.
— J