Book Talk: Mark Clifford on 'The Troublemaker', His New Biography of Jimmy Lai
February 6, 2025
18:00
London (Frontline Club)
Author Mark Clifford will address the Frontline Club in London on his new biography of Jimmy Lai, “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”
This is the astonishing story of the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai who became one of Hong Kong’s leading activists for democracy and is today China’s most famous political prisoner.
As a close friend of Jimmy Lai who has known the Next Digital founder and Apple Daily publisher for more than three decades, Mark Clifford has penned the authoritative biography of the man Beijing is desperate to silence.
He was on Next Digital’s Board of Directors when 500 police raided Apple Daily and dragged off its editor-in-chief and other senior staff and now faces the prospect of immediate arrest should he return to Hong Kong. A former editor of both the SCMP and The Standard, Mark now campaigns for the release of Jimmy Lai and his fellow political prisoners as President of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.
As CFHK Foundation supporters will know, Jimmy Lai has been held hostage in solitary confinement for almost four years on bogus charges of sedition and collusion with foreign forces. His trial resumed on November 20, making the book’s December 3 release both timely and poignant. “The Troublemaker” captures an iconic life story, covering Jimmy Lai’s escape from China’s oppressive state when he was 12, and his efforts to build a manufacturing empire in Hong Kong before he turned 30 – first making sweaters for companies like The Limited, then setting up an early fast-fashion chain that became the model for Uniqlo. The tens of millions of dollars he made helped fund his publishing business, which he started after the 1989 Tiananmen killings. He later led opposition to China’s repressive approach to Hong Kong when the British retreated and the Communist party took over.
As Mark says of Jimmy Lai’s journalistic instinct: “There’s something irresistible about a man who creates a publishing empire by knowing that readers want everything – investigative reporting and salacious gossip.”
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For the inside track on what it was like to put Jimmy Lai’s extraordinary life onto the page, please save the February 6 date and join us at The Frontline Club. To RSVP and reserve your seat, please contact david.green@thecfhk.org
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