Chan Kayu
On February 9, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region High Court sentenced Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison for two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces and one count of conspiring to publish seditious publications. The Wall Street Journal, a long-time supporter of Jimmy Lai, promptly published an opinion piece titled “Jimmy Lai Gets a Death Sentence.” Setting aside the misleading headline, what caught the author's attention was the article's mention that five U.S. congressmen have nominated Jimmy Lai for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, stating that “no one deserves this award more than him.”
In my observation, this isn't the first time U.S. lawmakers have campaigned for Jimmy Lai's Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Yet despite annual nominations ending in failure, they persist with unwavering enthusiasm. This “relentless” stance invites reflection: What value does Jimmy Lai truly hold that warrants such “persistence”?
Driven by immense curiosity, the author investigated the source of these nominations—the website of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC). What emerged was a bittersweet revelation: the “honorable” U.S. lawmakers have never taken Jimmy Lai seriously! Their campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize for him is nothing short of an international farce! Why?
First, the nomination content remains utterly unoriginal year after year. In introductions typically under 200 words, U.S. lawmakers consistently describe Jimmy Lai using hollow phrases like “founder of Apple Daily” and “critic of the government.” The 2023 introduction, at a mere 48 words, was half as long as the one for Joshua Wong. This year saw a slight addition of hollow praise like “a global symbol of nonviolent resistance against authoritarianism” or “upholding peace, democracy, and the rule of law through free media.” Yet the writing remains as sloppy and perfunctory as ever, as if merely going through the motions to fulfill some obligation. This half-hearted approach is less an expression of “support” for Jimmy Lai and more a political performance and routine gesture.
Second, the number of co-signers is meager, and the same few individuals repeatedly appear. With over 500 members in the U.S. Congress, only 2 to 5 participated in nominating Jimmy Lai. Take 2024 as an example: only Christopher H. Smith and Jeffrey A. Merkley co-signed. In other years, it was mostly politicians like James P. McGovern and John Moolenaar, who have long held anti-China stances. More ironically, as long as the nomination list includes one Democratic and one Republican lawmaker, these politicians dare to claim the move represents a “bipartisan consensus.” This tactic of packaging the collusion of individuals as the opinion of the majority is undoubtedly a mockery of democratic procedures.
Most crucially, the nomination timing has repeatedly and deliberately missed the Nobel Peace Prize nomination deadline. According to the Nobel Peace Prize nomination rules, January 31st of each year is the deadline for nominating candidates for that year. As seasoned politicians, these prominent members of Congress should be well aware of this rule. Yet upon review, it was found that with the exception of 2024, all nominations by U.S. lawmakers for Jimmy Lai were submitted after the respective deadlines (e.g., the 2023 nomination was made on February 2, and the 2026 nomination on February 4). Anyone with basic knowledge understands this means such nominations are fundamentally ineligible for the award in the year they are submitted. This deliberate act of “late nomination” inevitably raises questions: Are these politicians genuinely “seeking honor” for Jimmy Lai, or are they using nominations as a pretext to interfere in China's internal affairs?
This annual nomination farce exposes the hypocrisy and impotence of certain Western powers' China strategy. The Nobel Peace Prize has extremely low nomination thresholds—university presidents and professors across disciplines can participate—yet even so, Jimmy Lai's nomination is treated with such carelessness. This inevitably raises the question: If Western politicians cannot even manage a symbolic award with proper diligence, how can they be expected to exert genuine pressure for “releasing Jimmy Lai”? Their support likely extends no further than mere “solidarity.” For Jimmy Lai and his supporters to still fantasize about external forces securing their acquittal is nothing short of wishful thinking. Wake up!
InsightSpeak
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Ng Hiuying
The conviction and sentencing of Jimmy Lai Chee-ying for conspiring to collude with foreign forces under Hong Kong’s National Security Law has drawn sustained international attention. Much of that attention has focused on Lai himself and on Apple Daily, the now-defunct newspaper he founded. Far less scrutiny, however, has been directed at the role of another media institution that has followed the case with striking persistence: The Wall Street Journal.
A review of the Journal’s coverage over the past year shows dozens of articles related to Lai, a substantial proportion of which are editorials or opinion pieces rather than straight news reporting. In both volume and continuity, this level of engagement exceeds that of most other major Western media outlets. The question, therefore, is not whether the case is newsworthy, but why this particular newspaper appears so invested in it.
The reasons become clearer when one examines the factual findings set out in the trial judgment.
An Unusually Dense Web of Personal Connections
In the court’s Reasons for Verdict, a document running to more than 800 pages, the term “Wall Street Journal” appears over 40 times. More importantly, Lai himself admitted in evidence that he had been “very close” to the Wall Street Journal people.
The judgment establishes that several key intermediaries who facilitated Lai’s contacts with senior US officials had professional ties to the Wall Street Journal. Mary Kissel and Matt Pottinger, both former editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal, later entered the highest levels of the US policy apparatus. In 2019, Kissel served as an aide to then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, while Pottinger was the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor. Another figure, David Feith —the Wall Street Journal’s former employee who later worked at the US State Department — was found to have conveyed advance information to Lai’s aide regarding Washington’s intention to revoke Hong Kong’s special status.
These connections were not incidental. They functioned as channels through which Lai gained access to figures such as Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and other senior policymakers. In this sense, a shared professional background in the Journal’s opinion pages formed part of what might be described as the “lubricant” of Lai’s foreign lobbying activities.
The Journal as a Platform for Strategic Messaging
The judgment further records that in June 2019, former US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz suggested that Lai publish articles in major Western outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, to draw the attention of the White House to Hong Kong issues.
Crucially, the drafting of one such article was guided by Bill McGurn, Lai’s godfather and a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, who had previously served as President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter. In an August 2019 draft sent by Lai to McGurn, Lai argued that the United States “must confront China, not appease it,” and urged measures including visa sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials’ families, international condemnation of China’s religious persecution, and the establishment of a congressional panel to “monitor Beijing’s adherence to Hong Kong’s basic law”.
This article, the court found, set the tone for Lai’s subsequent public messaging — in newspaper columns, social media posts, and online broadcasts. It functioned as a kind of manifesto. Subsequent events confirmed its impact: Lai was informed on 25 February 2020 that his Wall Street Journal article published days earlier, “China’s Facade of Stability,” had been well received by Pence and his senior aides, who were anxious to see Lai when here, and discuss, among other things, Hong Kong’s forthcoming election.
If Apple Daily served as Lai’s domestic platform, the Wall Street Journal operated as his principal international outlet — an external-facing channel aimed at Western governments and audiences. This division of labour, as the evidence suggests, was strategic rather than accidental.
After Arrest: From Reporting to Advocacy
Following Lai’s arrest and subsequent conviction, the Wall Street Journal adopted an overtly supportive editorial posture. Beyond reporting on procedural developments, it repeatedly issued editorials and opinion columns passing value judgments on Hong Kong’s judiciary and on the case itself.
These pieces rarely engaged with the detailed factual findings of the court. Instead, they tended to subsume the criminal proceedings into a broader narrative of “political persecution”, “press freedom”, and “human rights crisis”. One editorial notoriously characterised Lai’s 20-year sentence as a “death sentence”, while others employed terms such as “China abuse Jimmy Lai” and “the Communists torture Jimmy Lai” to describe the legal process.
Given McGurn’s senior role within the Journal and his personal relationship with Lai, it is not unreasonable to infer that many of these editorials were shaped, if not authored, by him. Whatever the case, the tone and framing of the coverage suggest something closer to an advocacy campaign than detached commentary. The invocation of press freedom appears less an abstract defence of principle than an effort to rally support around a long-cultivated political ally.
Understanding the Pattern
Seen in this light, the Wall Street Journal’s intense focus on the Lai case is not simply a matter of journalistic zeal or the defence of universal values. It reflects a convergence of personal networks, long-standing ideological alignment, and concrete political interests — all documented, in substantial part, in the court’s findings.
This context helps explain why the Journal has continued to publish commentary critical of the Hong Kong courts despite repeated official rebuttals from the Hong Kong Government and the Commissioner’s Office of China’s Foreign Ministry in the Hong Kong SAR. For readers, recognizing this background does not require agreement with the verdict. It does, however, suggest the need for caution.
To read the Journal’s editorials on the Lai case without reference to these entanglements is to risk mistaking advocacy for analysis. A more informed assessment requires looking beyond the rhetoric of freedom and examining the specific relationships and actions that the court found, on the evidence, to constitute collusion.
Only then can the debate proceed on a clearer factual footing.
