Jeff Bezos apparently decided that millions in annual losses was too much for him to bear any longer at The Washington Post. Last week the venerable daily endured a fiscal rampage that has shuttered entire news divisions and dismissed 300 reporters and staff.

A world away from billionaire Bezos, another news publisher and self-made tycoon risked everything to keep his newspaper open and is now paying the ultimate price for it. Jimmy Lai, at 78, faces what amounts to a death sentence because of his stubborn insistence on freedom of expression in Hong Kong.

Political leaders and human rights activists around the world quickly condemned the 20-year sentence handed down by a Hong Kong court on Feb. 9. It is the harshest sentence so far for convictions under a sweeping national security law pushed through the Legislative Council of Hong Kong in 2020. Eight co-defendants, including editors and staff from Mr. Lai’s Apple Daily newspaper, were given jail terms ranging from six years and three months to 10 years.

Father Gianni Criveller, editor-in-chief of AsiaNews, a service of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, believes most people in Hong Kong support Mr. Lai and are troubled by his stiff sentence, though they cannot express that under the current political conditions.

“We should not forget that in the high days of the demonstrations in 2019, up to two million people went to the streets,” he said. “In a city of seven million people, that is a huge number. It means most of the people wanted to have a free and democratic Hong Kong.”

He added that since Beijing’s clampdown on democratic freedoms, more than 300,000 people have fled Hong Kong, amounting to roughly 10 percent of Hong Kong residents who hold British National Overseas passports that allow them to depart.

The publisher’s ‘crime’

“Although [Mr. Lai] is accused of crimes that sound terrible, in fact, he just did good journalism,” Father Criveller said. “He was just loyal to his principles and to his faith.”

The Catholic former publisher of Apple Daily, shuttered soon after its assets were frozen and many of its editors arrested along with Mr. Lai in 2020, was convicted on “national security” offenses in December—three counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and printing “seditious materials.”

A briefing on Hong Kong affairs with then-Vice President Mike Pence and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the midst of the demonstrations in 2019 was the foundation for one of the charges against him, but Jimmy Lai’s overarching “crime” was using his media platform to press for political freedom in Hong Kong and in China.

“But everybody can ask for a political change in your own country, this is part of human freedom,” Father Criveller said.

So far there has been no comment from Rome on Mr. Lai’s sentence, and it is not clear if it would be useful to Mr. Lai and whatever chance he might have for mercy from Beijing were Pope Leo XIV or a Vatican official to comment publicly on his sentence or urge his release. This may be an instance where subtle and mostly silent diplomacy, the kind at which Vatican officials excel, may offer Mr. Lai the best chance of receiving a humanitarian parole.

That’s something U.S. President Donald Trump might keep in mind if he has any intention of pressing China’s president, Xi Jinping, for Mr. Lai’s release. Keeping his finger off the “post” button at Truth Social may be the best help he can offer Mr. Lai. Beijing will surely not wish to appear that it has bowed to Western pressure over human rights.

The sentence is harsh, but having already served five years, Mr. Lai is sadly well experienced with life inside the Chinese political prison system. Jailed along with him, in addition to colleagues from Apple Daily, are pro-democracy activists who helped bring Hong Kong to a standstill in 2019. The weeks of demonstrations were evidence on the streets of Hong Kong of the widespread support for democratic freedom, but authorities in mainland China decided to put an end to the pro-democracy movement in July 2020.

The trials of Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho for inciting subversion under Hong Kong’s national security law began in January. The three had been key members of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China and for decades organized the annual vigil for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.

Many leaders of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement have Catholic, other Christian or Christian-adjacent backgrounds. Ironically, the same can be said for the pro-Beijing Hong Kong faction that jailed them and celebrated their convictions and sentences.

Carrie Lam, the former Hong Kong chief executive who managed the suppression of the pro-democracy movement, is Catholic. The current chief executive, John Lee, is also Catholic and attended a Jesuit high school in Hong Kong.

Mr. Lee’s reaction to Mr. Lai’s tough sentence was unapologetically in line with Beijing. He told local media during a weekly press briefing that Mr. Lai had used Apple Daily to “poison” the minds of young people in Hong Kong and to incite hatred and acts of vandalism and violence, suggesting that Mr. Lai received the sentence that he deserved because he openly urged foreign sanctions against China as well as Hong Kong.

“His heavy sentence of 20 years in prison demonstrated the rule of law, upheld justice and brought great satisfaction to the people,” Mr. Lee said.

But that “heavy sentence” was deplored by Volker Türk, the United Nations human rights chief, who said Mr. Lai was punished for “exercising rights protected under international law.” His office raised concerns that the charges’ broad scope risks criminalizing legitimate activities of civil society organizations and journalists.

“This is part of a broader repressive trend in Hong Kong, where hundreds have been arrested and prosecuted under these laws,” Mr. Türk said.

Amnesty International’s deputy regional director, Sarah Brooks, called Mr. Lai’s sentence “another grim milestone in Hong Kong’s transformation from a city governed by the rule of law to one ruled by fear.” In a statement released on Feb. 9, she called Mr. Lai a prisoner of conscience and charged that every day Mr. Lai spends behind bars “is a grave injustice.”

“Jimmy Lai’s imprisonment is a cold-blooded attack on freedom of expression that epitomizes the systematic dismantling of rights that once defined Hong Kong,” Ms. Brooks said, urging his immediate and unconditional release.

The national security law, passed by the Hong Kong legislative council in 2020 after bitter resistance from its pro-democracy wing, had been swiftly put to use in silencing dissent, curbing press freedoms and prosecuting opposition figures like Mr. Lai.

“Today is another dark day for justice,” Mr. Lai’s family said in a statement published shortly after the sentence was handed down.

“This draconian prison sentence is devastating for our family and life-threatening for my father,” Mr. Lai’s son, Sebastian Lai, said. “It signifies the total destruction of the Hong Kong legal system and the end of justice. After more than five years of relentlessly persecuting my father, it is time for China to do the right thing and release him before it is too late.”

Claire Lai, Mr. Lai’s daughter, called the 20-year imprisonment “a heartbreakingly cruel sentence.”

“I have watched my father’s health deteriorate dramatically, and the conditions he’s kept in go from bad to worse. If this sentence is carried out, he will die a martyr behind bars,” she said.

‘One country, two systems’

Hong Kong had been designated a special administrative region of China in 1997, when British rule ended after more than 150 years. The Basic Law negotiated between Beijing and Britain leading up to the handover was crafted to allow the Hong Kong S.A.R. “to exercise a high degree of autonomy and enjoy executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication.” It had been intended to govern the territory for 50 years.

But that “one country, two systems” commitment was never fully realized, and it unraveled completely in the aftermath of the large-scale demonstrations in 2019, initially provoked by a proposal to expedite criminal extraditions to mainland courts. By July 2020, Beijing imposed its national security law to shut down all dissent.

Mr. Lai first came to Hong Kong from his native Guangzhou as a 12-year-old stowaway on a fishing boat. He had nothing when he arrived but transformed himself into a wealthy commercial entrepreneur and a globally respected media figure. His story had been a premier example of the rags-to-riches dynamism that Hong Kong offered generations of Chinese people.

Now he is an exemplar of a different sort: grim evidence of what can happen to people who resist Beijing. In that role, Mr. Lai may have the makings of a martyr. He entered the church in 1997 when he was baptized by Cardinal Joseph Zen, then bishop of Hong Kong.

Before his arrest, Mr. Lai had every opportunity to escape his fate, and his wealth and connections would have made that flight a simple proposition, Father Criveller pointed out. He chose instead to stay and “share the fate of his people,” to keep publishing Apple Daily and to keep urging that Beijing honor the parameters of the Basic Law.

“This commitment came from his Catholic faith,” Father Criveller said. Many of the other leaders of the pro-democracy movement, imprisoned or in exile, have also been motivated by their faith, he added.

“They are not in prison because they are Catholics,” Father Criveller said. “They are in prison because they are democrats, but they are democrats because they are Catholic.”

He believes their commitment to political freedom and individual expression derives from church teaching on human dignity and the primacy of God-given human rights that they attempted to translate into civil law.

“This is what makes men and women children of God, that quality of freedom. Otherwise, we are not really dignified as human beings,” Father Criveller said. “You cannot take freedom away from the people.”

Father Criveller is confident that the people of Hong Kong will figure out how to persevere even as Beijing authorities, through political surrogates in Hong Kong, continue to suppress human rights in the territory. “Hong Kong people, like most Chinese people, are very brave in adapting to all the difficult situations in life,” Father Criveller said. “They have to go on with their lives, to make a living for their children and grandchildren.”

Everyday life in Hong Kong “is still a decent life,” he said. “People still get up in the morning, go to work and go to school” and generally carry on. “But political freedom is dead in Hong Kong,” Father Criveller said, and he cannot foresee now how it might be restored.

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The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week: The church in Spain wins an immigration victory after ‘royal decree’ offers amnesty to 500,000 and Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants is safe—for now.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).