The complex and differing images of jailed former tycoon Jimmy Lai

The latest prison term for former media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying will inevitably be portrayed by the Western media as further communist persecution of the city’s leading pro-democracy fighter. But many local people who lived through more than two decades of Lai’s media dominance will have a very different take. If you want a better understanding of this intriguing and complex figure, you need to take into account both his local and international images.

Lai, 75, has been jailed for 69 months and fined HK$2 million (US$256,850) for fraud. The District Court has also banned him from managing any company for eight years. Meanwhile, he is facing charges of collusion with foreign forces under the city’s national security law.

In post-1997 Hong Kong, Lai was one of its most powerful people. Through his now-defunct media empire and massive donations, he influenced large swathes of public opinion, and financed and mobilised the pan-democratic opposition, especially legislators, against the local and central governments. One way to describe him is as the local mini-version of Rupert Murdoch, the global media magnate whose approval or disdain bring joy or terror to politicians across the English-speaking world.

Similarly, local officials, judges, tycoons and celebrities feared Lai’s paparazzi; likewise, victims and their families of terrible accidents and gruesome crimes, whose privacy was often ruthlessly violated. Admittedly in the latter, his two primary, now-defunct publications, Apple Daily and Next Magazine, weren’t the only ones; other local publications were also guilty.

In 1998, Lai publicly apologised after Apple Daily paid associates of a cheating husband, Chan Kin-hong, HK$5,000 to follow him visiting mainland prostitutes and photographing them in bed. That was after Chan became notorious when his wife threw their two children out of a window then leapt to her own death.