David J. Butler
When Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the democratic world should have recoiled. A 78-year-old publisher, convicted after one of the longest political trials in modern history, was condemned to die behind bars for the crime of journalism.
Instead, the response was restrained. A few official statements. A handful of editorials. Then silence.
That silence tells us something deeply uncomfortable — not only about Hong Kong’s descent into authoritarianism, but about how the free world decides which political prisoners matter, and which can be quietly absorbed into the background.
Lai’s case is not ambiguous. Prosecuted under Hong Kong’s sweeping national security law, he was denied a jury and the lawyer of his choice. He was convicted for publishing arguments in favor of democratic freedoms China promised Hong Kong and then systematically dismantled. His newspapers were shuttered. His voice erased. His health is failing. At 78, this sentence amounts to a life term.
And yet, Lai has not become a defining global cause.
Contrast that with other cases. When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in custody, the world responded with fury. When American journalist Evan Gershkovich was detained, governments mobilized, editorial boards rallied and sustained pressure followed until his release. These campaigns mattered — and they worked.
The difference is not moral seriousness. It is structural.
By the time Navalny died and Gershkovich was arrested, Russia was already sanctioned, isolated and openly designated an adversary. Pressuring Moscow imposed marginal costs, not systemic ones. China is different. Its economy, supply chains, universities, corporations and diplomatic relationships are deeply embedded in Western life. Confronting Beijing over a single prisoner risks disruption across those systems.
Lai’s case does not merely condemn a foreign regime; it forces a reckoning with the price of engagement.
Former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky understands this dynamic intimately. Sharansky spent nine years in Soviet prisons because he refused to renounce his beliefs. He did not have the option of leaving. What he had was the choice authoritarian regimes always offer: cooperate, recant, trade truth for conditional freedom. He refused.
Sharansky has spoken out forcefully for Lai because he recognizes the same moral moment. Lai, unlike Sharansky, could have left. A wealthy man and a British citizen, he was urged to do so before his arrest. He declined. “I will not betray my people,” he said. Like Sharansky, he chose prison over participation in a lie.
That choice should resonate deeply. It has not — because Lai’s case demands more than sympathy.
Defending Lai would require sacrifice. It would mean conditioning engagement with China — trade, diplomacy, cultural exchange — on consequences Beijing would rather avoid. His imprisonment asks governments and institutions to choose between access and accountability, between stability and principle. Too often, the response has been compartmentalization.
Governments cannot evade this responsibility. Western leaders describe relations with Beijing in terms of supply chains, climate coordination and economic stability. High-level meetings proceed; strategic dialogues emphasize “guardrails.” Political prisoners, by contrast, are raised as concerns rather than conditions. Engagement moves forward. Consequences rarely do.
Institutions follow similar patterns. Corporations lobby for market access and predictability. Universities maintain partnerships and funding streams. Religious and civic institutions speak eloquently about conscience and human dignity. Engagement itself is not inherently wrong. But when defending prisoners threatens access or influence, advocacy often softens.
The pattern appears on university campuses as well, though for different reasons. Student activism is rarely driven by trade calculations or diplomatic access; it is driven by visibility and moral clarity. Causes that feel immediate and legible can ignite rapid mobilization. Repression in places like Iran or China is more diffuse, politically complex and harder to sustain as a focal point. The result is not indifference so much as diffusion.
Yet diffusion has consequences. Chinese students studying abroad know that dissent can carry risks for their families at home. When high-profile cases like Lai’s pass with limited public solidarity, it reinforces a stark reality: visibility does not guarantee protection. Silence, even unintended silence, becomes part of the pressure authoritarian regimes rely on.
Journalism faces its own reckoning. Lai is imprisoned for doing precisely what journalists celebrate as their highest calling: publishing uncomfortable truths. When a publisher is condemned to die in prison for journalism, and the profession responds with intermittent attention rather than sustained outrage, it raises an unavoidable question: whose press freedom are we prepared to defend?
History offers a warning. Soviet dissidents were not freed because authoritarian regimes discovered mercy. They were freed because democratic societies insisted — relentlessly — that their lives mattered, even when doing so was awkward or costly. Sharansky himself walked free because the world refused to let him disappear.
Jimmy Lai’s case forces a broader reckoning. Not every prisoner of conscience will become a global icon. But if only the most politically convenient prisoners command our attention, then our commitment to freedom is thinner than we pretend.
The question is no longer only whether Jimmy Lai will be freed. It is whether the free world still has the moral stamina to care — consistently — about those who pay the price for telling the truth, even when doing so costs us something. If we cannot, authoritarian regimes will know that time, fear and economic leverage reliably outlast our outrage.
David J. Butler is an attorney. He is president of Dvash Consulting, LLC and a member of the ownership group of Mid-Atlantic Media, which owns and publishes Washington Jewish Week.
