President-elect Donald Trump can make his mark in history in many ways. He can tame Washington’s unaccountable bureaucracy, return America to low-inflationary economic growth, and eliminate woke practices. He won on these messages, and they are part of his mandate.

Trump also stumped on being tough on China. And there is something he can do to get instant acclaim on that score: get China’s President Xi Jinping to release Jimmy Lai. Lai is the world’s best-known political prisoner. He remains indomitable despite being consigned to solitary confinement 23 hours a day for years on the island of Hong Kong.

It just so happens that Trump also campaigned on having Lai released from prison. In an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Oct. 24, Trump promised he’d do it. Here is the exchange:

Hugh Hewitt: There’s a guy named Jimmy Lai who is very important to America’s Catholics, to the world’s Catholics. He’s a Catholic in Hong Kong and, you know, a great publisher, a billionaire like you. Xi has him in jail. Do you think you could speak to Xi, when you’re back in the presidency, about getting Jimmy Lai out and out of the country?

Trump: One hundred percent, yes.

Hewitt: Thank you. That matters a lot to Catholics.

Trump: I mean, you know, look. When I was there, basketball players stole things from Louis Vuitton and great stores, right? And they were being drafted and to be drafted. It was a big story. And it was an automatic 10 years in China. I got them out. I said listen, do me a favor. Let these guys out. They went there with the national basketball team, USA, was playing China. And they got caught stealing things, and I got them out, and I got them out relatively easy. … By the way, 100%, I’ll get him out. He’ll be easy to get out. But we don’t have people that even talk about it. We don’t have people to talk.

Lai is a 77-year-old Hong Kong billionaire publisher who knew that communist China hated that his media companies told the truth. He could have fled the former British colony any time he wanted since China took over in 1997 but bravely chose to stay. He has been back in the news during the past two weeks because he took the stand in his criminal trial in Hong Kong on charges of sedition and “collusion with foreign powers,” charges brought under China’s draconian National Security Law.

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The Chinese authorities ludicrously accuse him of colluding with the U.S. government against China and also of being behind anti-Beijing demonstrations in Hong Kong in the 2010s. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said last week at a press briefing in Beijing that “Jimmy Lai is the principal mastermind and perpetrator behind the series of riots that shook Hong Kong. He is an agent and henchman of those hostile to China.” There is, therefore, zero expectation of innocence.

Lai denies all of it, and I can personally attest that he’s telling the truth.

I have known Jimmy for 30 years and have been to his house many times. I’ve sat with him during dinner with his family and friends, including with Hong Kong’s top politicians and members of the Catholic clergy. I’m proud to call Jimmy a friend. The charges against him are hogwash, trumped-up lies that only communists can bring with a straight face.

The reason the Hong Kong authorities, under orders from Beijing, arrested Lai is that he owned Hong Kong’s last independent newspaper, Apple Daily. That alone was an affront to Beijing’s communist leaders, who have reneged on their promise to Britain that they would leave Hong Kong’s system alone.

So in August 2020, six weeks after imposing the National Security Law, China’s leaders arrested Lai at his home. What happened next was pure communist psyops, intended to send a message to the rest of the city’s residents. 

As the American journalist Mark Clifford tells in his gripping new book on Lai, The Troublemaker, “Police bundled Lai into a police vehicle and drove him the ten miles to Apple Daily offices,” which 250 armed policemen had just raided. They filed Lai through the lobby, past busts of his classical liberal heroes, including Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, “escorted Lai into an elevator and perp-walked him through the maze of editorial desks and cubicles.”

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The purpose was to intimidate the staff of Apple Daily, and Hong Kong’s 8 million citizens, into submission. The authorities failed on the first account, at least. Apple Daily went on telling the news about what was happening in Hong Kong until the police shuttered it in mid-2021.

At his trial last week, Jimmy said that Apple Daily upheld the core values of the “rule of law, freedom, the pursuit of democracy, freedom of speech, religion and assembly.”

His newspaper, he said, sought to “participate in delivering information, which I think is freedom—to deliver freedom. The more information you have, the more you are in the know, the more you are free.”

And that, freedom, is what China’s communists can’t abide. Trump will strike a blow for freedom if he keeps his campaign promise and tells Xi to liberate this innocent man.