But this doesn't make it any less heartbreaking.
At age 78, and with his health worn down severely by the past six years he has already spent in jail for a previous “crime” against the Chinese Communist Party/State, Jimmy Lai is not likely to live long enough to see freedom again in his own beloved city.
I have few words to add to what I have written before about Jimmy Lai (see HERE and HERE), and about the Hong Kong Democracy Movement’s long, brave, persistent, but finally smothered public protest campaign (2014-2020) against the tightening grip of the CCP.
Instead, I worked for some time crafting this digital image (above) that attempts to visualize (and in some way evoke the “tangible” dimension of) the suffering of the Catholic convert and former-opposition-newspaper-publisher in his prison cell.
This is what happens to human persons under regimes that grasp power for its own sake, or seek to justify the abuse of power for the sake of its alleged “efficiency.”
I don’t believe that this is the “end” of Hong Kong’s (or for that matter China’s) struggle for freedom and human dignity. The events of the past decade — like those at Tiananmen Square in 1989 — may be "erased" from the CCP's official story of modern China. But the Chinese people have long memories. We can only hope that these events are seeds of the new directions that China will discover and take up in the future.
Remember Jimmy Lai and pray for him.
