On January 14 in a CBC interview, Goldy Hyder, president and chief executive officer of the Business Council of Canada, attempted to shine a positive light on the Prime Minister’s recent economic deals with China. Hyder warned that global politics and economies were rapidly changing and that Canada needed to solidify relationships with other strategic partners, specifically with China. The CBC interviewer only had one concern: “NATO also calls China a strategic risk.” Later in the segment, a human rights advocate, Cheuk Kwan, talked about the imprisonment of Jimmy Lai. Kwan was brought in for a reason—that is, to discredit China with its alleged human rights violations. He is the co-chairman of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China. According to their website, it was founded in May 1989 to support the student protest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the movement for democratic reform in China.^[1]

But who is Jimmy Lai?

The BBC claims he is “one of the fiercest critics of the Chinese state and a leading figure advocating democracy in the former British territory.”^[2] However, Lai is much more than that. “I’m a born rebel,” he told the BBC in an interview in 2020, hours before he was charged. “I have a very rebellious character.” Lai doesn’t only claim he is a born rebel, the billionaire firmly believes he was chosen and destined for greatness. In Lai’s biography, The Troublemaker, is a detailed account of the life of Jimmy Lai from his childhood up until his recent arrest. The author is Mark L. Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, which is a US-based NGO, and he has a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. “Lai defies easy characterization,” Clifford writes, “His success as a pragmatic businessman meant that he approached human rights activism in a results-oriented way. He’s interested in freedom, but you won’t hear him talk much about social justice. His philosophy verges on libertarian, contending that government should play a limited role beyond providing order and a strong rule of law. A Catholic, he is a militant anticommunist in the mold of John Paul II, the Polish pope who encouraged the democratic uprisings in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s.” It is quite accurate to define him as a libertarian because multiple times in the book Jimmy Lai speaks about weed in the dorkiest attempt to look cool and edgy. Lai was the founder of Apple Daily, where the “only forbidden area was commentary that smacked of socialist economics.” All mythological heroes need an origin story and Clifford tells us that when Jimmy’s father left for Hong Kong, “Lai’s mother, Liang Shaoxia, chose to stay. His crying father picked the young boy up as he was leaving and said, “You are going to do great things.” The scene would haunt Lai for decades, fueling his belief that he was somehow a chosen person even as he hunted for the father who had abandoned him.” The media tycoon would himself become a father later and it wasn’t without its difficulties. Indeed, in the book we learn that “as soon as they were married, Lai wanted children. After three months with no result, he worried about fertility problems. ‘He complained I had something wrong with me because I didn’t immediately get pregnant,’ Judy says.” Of course, a man chosen for greatness could never have fertility problems himself and it had to be his wife’s fault. Nevertheless, he was quickly proven wrong, since their oldest child, Tim, was born about a year later in October 1977. This kind of attitude was pathological: “He and Judy ate out often. He didn’t want her to cook. He said, ‘No you don’t cook,’  she [Judy] remembers. ‘He didn’t want to make me unhappy if he didn’t like my food.’”

The aforementioned BBC article notes that “In 2021, he urged Donald Trump to help the [Hong Kong] territory, saying he was ‘the only one who can save us’ from China. His newspaper, Apple Daily, published a front-page letter that finished: Mr President, please help us.” On January 6, 2021, the Capitol in Washington, D.C was attacked by reactionaries. Jimmy Lai’s Apple Daily had help to foment the rage that led to the riot by fabricating a story against Joe Biden that was used to spread accusations about the presidential candidate’s son and his business dealings in China. Lai denies his responsibility, but admits his associate Mark Simon was involved.^[3] Simon, defined as “Lai’s longtime aide” in the book The TroubleMaker, served in the U.S. Navy, and his father was a career bureaucrat at the CIA. Clifford recounts that Lai “talks less about universal human rights than about values, especially what he calls Western values, by which he means freedom and tolerance and the use of law to give people a sense of security.”

What are these so-called Western values?

“We’ve seen a backsliding of democracies and democratic values everywhere around the world, including in some of the world’s historically strongest democracies,” former Prime Minister Trudeau said at the World Economic Forum. “The 80 years of stability and prosperity that the world has seen since the end of the horrors of World War Two is over. That era is done. We are now in a transition period where we are creating the new world we live in,” he added. Justin Trudeau doesn’t agree that “hard power” is the manner in which countries should deal among themselves. Instead, he prefers “soft power,” relating a story about small businesses boycotting American products as an example of Canadians standing up for each other.^[4]

As for Prime Minister Mark Carney, the CBC writes, “[he] delivered a frank assessment of how he views the world in a provocative speech in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, where he said the longstanding U.S.-led, rules-based international order is over and middle powers like Canada must pivot to avoid falling prey to further “coercion” from powerful actors.” The speech is surprisingly lucid: “This is not naive multilateralism. Nor is it relying on diminished institutions. It is building the coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu,” Carney said. "We are engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for the world as we wish it to be. The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger and more just. […] Great powers can afford to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: to compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact. […] Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We have the most educated population in the world. We have capital, talent and a government with the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.”^[5]

The leaders of Europe are attempting a to form a bloc, a new order to correspond to the world’s rapidly changing conditions. Von der Leyen in her speech said that Europe must increase its independence in the face of what she described as seismic change in international relations, including improving security ties with partners she named as including Canada, Iceland, Norway and the United Kingdom.^[6] Mark Carney agrees: “Our commitment to Article 5 is unwavering. We are working with our NATO allies to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks." Greenland is even more irrelevant than Ukraine for them. Here, the goal is a new economic power attuned to the corresponding changes in international relations. The contradiction of the Western world against the Global South/China continues, but under a new European-led Western alliance. The Western supremacist ideal and their values can be summarized in one single word: anticommunism. Yet socialism is the future and the future is trying to come into being. This is why Carney has to make trade deals with China. But the old world is stubborn and these countries will violently resist turning into socialist states. Fascism is the result of an exhausted middle class without a way out yet still ideologically aligned to capitalism. The third path that Carney spoke of is the same phenomenon. They are aware that Trump will be gone after the next election and that the democratic party has a high chance of winning again. The liberals in the USA will consolidate this “new” world order. Remember what Kamala Harris said in 2024: “As Commander in Chief I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”^[7] But NATO is the world’s police and America will formally rejoin again the next election. Beware of buzzwords such as democratic socialism because any movement not explicitly socialist are fascistic in content. The portrayal of Jimmy Lai as a defender of democracy is frightening because he is an anticommunist. The media is praising a fascist and liberals are falling for it.