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Why Donald Trump’s Visit To Beijing Could Decide Jimmy Lai’s Fate
WASHINGTON—When President Donald Trump heads to Beijing this spring, he’ll have the opportunity to do what pretty much no one else in the world can: convince Chinese President Xi Jinping to free Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy newspaper publisher and media tycoon imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party.
The 78-year-old Lai was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison under a national security law used by the Chinese Communist Party to crack down on dissenters. At his age, and with his declining health, the CCP’s sentence means he’ll die in prison.
Lai is a Chinese-born British citizen who published “Apple Daily” in Hong Kong from 1995 to 2021. Chinese authorities arrested top executives at the publication and froze its assets in 2021, and, after a two-year trial and five-year detention, Lai was convicted in December 2025 of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and publish seditious material.
Authorities paint him as “the mastermind and behind-the-scenes manipulator,” celebrating the 20-year-sentence.
His daughter, who advocates on her father’s behalf in the United States, describes him very differently. In an interview with The Daily Wire, Claire Lai praised her father’s courage in the face of oppression. She shared that he mails her letters from prison — letters that include prayers of deep faith and acceptance, offering his sufferings up to Jesus Christ and encouraging his fellow prisoners to do the same.
“From the very first day I went to visit him, I remember I was very emotional,” Claire told The Daily Wire. Her father comforted her, she says, by telling her that “he’s in God’s good hands, and he’ll find ways to serve him from behind bars.”
“I know that God will continue to give him the strength to persevere in faith,” she said. “We need to persevere in fighting for his freedom.”
Claire Lai with her father Jimmy Lai.
Trump has said that he will do everything he can to save Lai. He will head to Beijing in April, POLITICO reports (though the White House says dates have not yet been finalized), where Lai’s family hopes the president will make the case for their father’s freedom.
“I feel so badly,” Trump said in December after Lai’s conviction. “I spoke to President Xi about it, and I asked to consider his release. He’s not well. He’s an older man and he’s not well, so I did put that request out. We’ll see what happens.”
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the Hong Kong High Court’s decision to sentence Lai to 20 years, calling it “an unjust and tragic conclusion to this case.” Rubio urged the authorities to grant Lai humanitarian parole, arguing that Lai and his family “have suffered enough.”
“It shows the world that Beijing will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong, casting aside the international commitments Beijing made in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration,” Rubio said.
Asked by The Daily Wire about Lai’s fate during the White House press briefing Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt suggested that the president may advocate for Lai in April.
“This is something I’ve heard the President advocate for, both publicly and privately,” she told The Daily Wire. “I had the honor of being in that meeting with President Trump and President Xi in South Korea that took place, and this was brought up by the President himself. It is important to him, and he looks forward to visiting China in April.”
Lai’s daughter is incredibly grateful for the strong American interest in her father’s plight and hopeful that American intervention might save her father.
“We are extremely grateful,” she said, “to [Trump] and to his administration, [that has] a proven track record of freeing those [who] were unjustly detained abroad and doing so with a high degree of success. We are just hopeful that our father will be one of them.”
Lai’s friends and family have highlighted his plight for years. Claire’s brother Sebastian Lai lives in London, where he leads the international campaign to free his father. Her mother remains in China and was present at Jimmy’s sentencing on Monday.
In interviews, they describe how he was arrested and detained, and forced to spend more than 1,800 days in solitary confinement.
China’s 2020 National Security Law is so vaguely worded and so arbitrarily applied that Claire Lai knows she could face retribution for speaking out in her father’s defense while in China. She has lived in the United Kingdom and the United States for the past few years as she begs the world to help save her father.
She takes great solace in her Catholic faith, which she shares with both her mother and her father. Jimmy Lai is a Catholic convert with a deep love for Jesus Christ. His daughter shares that he used to draw pictures of Jesus Christ on the cross for other prisoners until he was told by his prison guards that he was no longer permitted to do so.
From prison, he writes to his daughter, offering her prayers of comfort and solace.
“The day that [British Prime Minister Keir Starmer] flew to China, I was feeling quite uneasy,” she reflected to The Daily Wire, recalling the day that Starmer went to China to meet with President Xi. She went to mass at Immaculate Conception Church, a parish in Washington D.C., and prayed for the strength to accept whatever happened to her father.
“A few days later I got a letter from Dad,” she shared, “and in his letters he sends me his prayers and he basically echoed what I was feeling in that moment…he was in our Lord’s good hands.”
“I think that that’s what has seen him through the last few years,” she said. “And at times it’s really just our good Lord which has seen him through the bad days.”
Claire Lai shared copies of her father’s prayers exclusively with The Daily Wire, prayers in which Jimmy Lai surrenders his future to Jesus Christ, asking Jesus Christ to “work in me and through me.”
You are the all-seeing, all-knowing God. Your eyes, oh Lord, are in every place…You are present and conscious of all I think, every deed or act, however slight, every word, however quick…every thought of my heart, however secret, however momentary. However forgotten, you see, O Lord, you see and note down… “Whither shall I go from your Spirit?” (Ps 139:7) I am in your hands, O Lord, absolutely.
In another prayer, Jimmy Lai acknowledges the longevity of his imprisonment thus far, offering his sickness and confusion up for “some great end which is quite beyond us” and arguing that Jesus Christ “does nothing in vain.”
We are all created to His glory. We are created to do His will. Therefore: I will trust him…if I am sick; my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if in sorrow, my sorrow may serve him. My sickness or my perplexity or my sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end which is beyond us. He does nothing in vain. Lord, deign to fulfill your high purposes in me whatever they may be. Work in me and through me.
Cheers, Dad.
And in yet another letter, he tells his daughter that his suffering over the past few years has brought him closer to God.
I am actually most grateful for God to have put me through this suffering in order for me to get closer to His presence. What a joy and treasure for this life and next. God’s action confounds us but always turns out to be marvellous for us.
Lai’s daughter is also deeply religious, mentioning multiple Catholic saints during her conversation with The Daily Wire, including Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest imprisoned by Nazis in Auschwitz who offered to die in the place of another prisoner. When she is particularly worried about her father, she shared, she goes to mass in the evenings and receives the Eucharist, which is a huge source of comfort to her.
“In that moment I know what Maximilian Kolbe meant,” she said, quoting the Catholic martyr, who is remembered saying: “If angels would be jealous of men, they would be so for one reason: Holy Communion.”
“It’s exactly what I needed, and I think it was our good Lord giving me comfort. I don’t think anyone can convince me otherwise. I know he’s giving my father strength to persist in faith.”
For Catholics, receiving the Eucharist at Mass is of pivotal importance, since Catholics believe that receiving the Eucharist allows the faithful to be closely united with Jesus Christ himself. But for about two and a half years, Claire says, her father was denied the Eucharist in prison. The Chinese government told them that he was receiving the Eucharist regularly, but she insists they were lying.
“I counted,” she said. “He received it, in 2.5 years, a total of 11 times. That is not regular.”
Hong Kong media tycoon and pro-democracy supporter Jimmy Lai attends a rally near the government headquarters in Hong Kong on September 28, 2014. (Photo by ALEX OGLE/AFP via Getty Images)
Outside pressure occasionally leads to better treatment for her father, but over the past five years, his treatment has gone from bad to worse. She speaks to him through physical letters that they mail to each other. She writes to him about once a week, but often doesn’t receive his responses for up to a month as they are processed.
His health is failing him. He has been diabetic for over 30 years, and throughout his imprisonment, Claire and the rest of his family have watched Jimmy’s pre-existing health conditions worsen due to a lack of care. She says his blood sugar is checked once every three weeks, and he’s developed new health conditions — heart issues, blood pressure problems, an enlarged spleen, and more.
The United Kingdom and the United Nations have requested that the Chinese government send an independent consultant in to check on him, she says, but that has been rejected.
“We are extremely worried for his health and the conditions in which he’s kept,” she said.
“His body is failing, but he is such a spirited man.”
Claire Lai with her parents.
Jimmy Lai is imprisoned with a number of other political prisoners in Hong Kong, his daughter shared. Many of them are not Catholic or even Christian, and Jimmy has sought to convert his fellow prisoners by drawing the crucifixion for them.
“On the other side, he would write instructions on how to pray, sometimes what to read, and sometimes he would ask me to get certain books, or get the Bishop Barron’s ‘Word on Fire’ for them,” she explained, referring to the work of Bishop Robert Barron.
“One day, the guards told him that he has to stop sending it to prisoners because some people have decided to convert as a result,” she said sadly.
There was one agnostic prisoner, imprisoned a few months after her father, who was struggling intensely with his new life in prison. His distress finally prompted him to ask Jimmy for help learning how to pray, she said, and the two men began exchanging letters back and forth. Her father drew a picture of Jesus Christ crucified for the agnostic prisoner, telling him, according to his daughter, that “when the suffering gets too much for you, just pretend like you’re hiding under his feet, and offering your suffering up to him.”
“That would make it all better,” Claire says, “because…if you’re looking for God’s grace, you really don’t have to look far.”
The other prisoner wasn’t immediately convinced. But one day, Claire says, her father got a letter from the prisoner, saying: “I know what you mean now.”
“That really touched me,” she said. “I have always been Catholic, but if I was agnostic and I was going through a whole different, and intense suffering, I’m not sure if I could have done that, but he did.”
That is the legacy Jimmy Lai will be remembered for in his Hong Kong prison, by his family, and by his many supporters throughout the world: a man who prayed through his suffering and taught others to pray with him.
His daughter is still hopeful that he will be freed. Yet, at the same time, she knows that the grief-stricken past few years have taught her exactly what he wished.
“At the start of his imprisonment he said all he wanted was for us, his children, to see the reality of the world through the grace and mercy of God,” she said. “And I am reminded that is what he always did.”
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