Voices of Freedom - Interview wth Mark L. Clifford

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

An Interview with Mark L. Clifford, Author and Editor For more than four years, one of the greatest entrepreneurs in Hong Kong’s history has been in solitary confinement on sham charges that could lead to imprisonment for life. Despite being held in a small cell, 77-year-old Jimmy Lai has become one of Beijing’s greatest threats and one of the world’s most courageous leaders in the fight for freedom. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Mark L. Clifford, Lai’s close friend and an advocate for freedom in Hong Kong. He shares Lai’s remarkable story, from his childhood in poverty, to his rise as a successful business owner and newspaper publisher, to his stand against tyranny. This year, The Bradley Foundation has awarded Lai with an Honorary Bradley Prize for his unwavering commitment to the ideals of freedom. Topics Discussed on this Episode: Lai’s childhood on mainland China and why he fled to Hong Kong How Lai was able to quickly rise above his circumstances The influence of free market ideas on Lai’s career and life The impact of Tiananmen Square and the massacre of 1989 Lai’s introduction to Catholicism and how religion shaped his belief system Lai’s decision to stay in Hong Kong and take a stand for freedom Lai’s state of mind after more than four years in prison Why the Chinese Communist Party fears Lai Whether there’s hope for Hong Kong’s democratic movement About Mark L. Clifford: Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, the former executive director of the Asia Business Council, and a former board member at Next Digital. He is editorial chair of the Asian Review of Books and served as editor in chief of both English-language papers in Hong Kong, The Standard and the South China Morning Post.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. About 8,000 miles away from the United States, a 77-year-old man sits in solitary confinement in a cell without natural light. He's been there for more than 1,500 days, awaiting the conclusion of a long, drawn-out

trial on sham charges that could result in imprisonment for life. Yet, according to our guest today, that man is as free as he's ever been. That man is Jimmy Lai, a successful entrepreneur and newspaper publisher who took a courageous stand for freedom in the face of an oppressive authoritarian regime. His unbreakable spirit has made him a beacon of hope for human rights advocates and for those suffering under tyranny. This year, the Bradley Foundation is awarding Jimmy Lai an honorary Bradley Prize. Joining me now is Mark Clifford, a journalist and author who has known Jimmy for more than

30 years. Mark spent 28 years in Hong Kong where he served as editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and the Standard, of which he was also the publisher. His new book is called The Troublemaker, How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic. Mark is also president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. Welcome, Mark.

It is great to have you with us. Great to be here. Thanks. Thanks for the very kind introduction. You are very welcome. Well, let's jump right in, Mark. Jimmy's life is a true rags to riches story. Not much question about that. It's one of sacrifice, ambition, perseverance, grit. Let's start at the beginning. Let's talk about his childhood on mainland China. What was it like and why did he flee to Hong Kong?

Yeah, well, that's a great place to start. As you say, literally rags to riches story. He was born a couple of years before Mao took power or the communists took power in China in 1949. The family was ripped apart by the revolution. His mother was sent to labor camps, was humiliated, had to kneel on glass, be jeered at by other Chinese. Jimmy wanted to escape all that and he fled to Hong Kong at the age of 12, if you can

believe it. And when I was writing this book, I've known Jimmy a long time, but I didn't go into this with the idea of writing a biography. And by the time I did, he was of course in prison. I wondered like, why did his mother let a 12 year old boy leave? And I realized, well, he was in the middle of a famine that killed 45 million people in China.

You think about that, 45 million people dead as a result of Mao's policies. That's the China Jimmy left. He was one of more than a million refugees who fled to the British colony of Hong Kong, slept on a factory floor initially, worked his way up. 15 years after he came, he owned a factory and pretty soon became the biggest sweater maker in Hong Kong, maybe in Asia. He got bored with making sweaters, decided to go into the retail business, started a wildly successful retail chain. And from there went into the media, went into politics.

He was just heartbroken by the killings in 1989 when the Chinese government killed hundreds, maybe thousands of its best and brightest young people. And started first a magazine, then a newspaper in Hong Kong with a very pro-democracy, anti-communist party slant. And it just kept going. And he kept standing up to the Communist Party. And eventually, they took over in 1997, took over from the British and it became a Chinese city and Jimmy kept fighting. In the end, the Chinese government threw him in jail and as you so eloquently put it, that's where he is today, over 1,500 days in prison on completely sham charges simply for believing

in freedom and being the owner of a media organization that believed in freedom and democracy. I mean, back to the beginning, did he flee by himself with other family members? He went by himself at age 12. He got a one-way permit to Macau, which was a Portuguese colony then, and he lived pretty nearby. From Macau, he stowed away on a fishing boat. As far as I know, he had no friends or relatives in Macau, nobody to help him.

He must have had some names or somehow known how to find these smuggling boats. A perilous journey, 50 or so miles across the Pearl River Delta from Macau to Hong Kong comes in literally, you know, with what they call snakeheads, people smugglers who brought him in and dumped him at his aunt and uncle's shack. Their place was so tiny, there wasn't even room for Jimmy to sleep on the floor that first night. That's how we ended up in the factory. It's just an incredible, unbelievable story.

But he was one of, as I said, over a million refugees who really took a lot of risks. A lot of people died in that crossing to escape Maoist, to escape communist China. And thousands, tens of thousands made it really big in Hong Kong and took advantage of the opportunities, the free market, the liberty, the rule of law, everything that the British colony offered. I mean, look, it was a colonial government. It wasn't perfect. Chinese didn't have as many rights as British people did. You know what?

It allowed enough freedom and enough protection for private property, enough ability for an entrepreneur to get ahead. And Jimmy was one of those go-go guys who made it big. But again, I want to emphasize Jimmy's story is the story of Hong Kong. Many, many people who made it to Hong Kong and made it to some version of at least middle class success, if not absolute wealth of Jimmy's scale. I mean, you mentioned, actually, by age 27, he purchased his own garment factory and by his 30s had an international brand.

Never went to business school. Everyone went to high school or primary school. Nothing. I mean, how was he able to do that? I mean, just basic. How at that age can you access the capital to start a business like that so early in life and so quickly? Well, he's an extraordinary guy and he, as you say,

primary school dropout. Interestingly, as a twin sister who just breathes through school, Jimmy was repeating grades even in primary school, but he has a, he's obviously super off the charts smart and has a vision. I would say a creative artistic vision as well as entrepreneurial drive and ideas. And it was interesting your question about where to get the capital. Well, Hong Kong in the 1970s, it wasn't a lot of capital, but it had a real go-go entrepreneurial culture. It wasn't kind of like Silicon Valley today, but it was in the sense that the export industry was really taking off. Hong Kong was the

first of the Asian Tigers. It was ahead of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan. There was this export business. China was shut off as a result of the embargo put in place by the United Nations after the Korean War. So a lot of manufacturing moved to Hong Kong. Jimmy was able to get some friends and some of one friend's parent father in particular to back him. And luckily for him, he'd invested in the stock market when it did well in the early 70s, had sold out right before the oil shock of the 1974, I guess

and factories are going bankrupt. And so it was pretty easy for him to pick up a, you know, a bankrupt factory that already had the equipment. So I don't want to say it was easy. It was tough. It was really tough going. But this was, this was the Hong Kong in the 1970s. It was kind of, if you were smart, if you were gifted, if you were driven, you had a chance. It was that environment that it, which didn't exist in China. You think if Jimmy had stayed in China, if he hadn't died of famine, he just would have been like a street urchin or, you know, it would have been nothing. And

that's where you see the difference between a free society that gives opportunities for people like Jimmy Lai and a communist tyranny, which would have just wasted all his gifts. And I would argue is wasting his gifts now. You've locked up in prison one of the greatest entrepreneurs in Chinese history. Later on in his adult life, Jimmy was clearly influenced by Hayek's Road to Serfdom. How did he come across that book? And why do you think he connected with Hayek's belief that free markets were essential to a flourishing society? Yeah, great and interesting answer to that question.

How did he come across that? Because he was in the garment trade, he came to New York a lot. It was a kind of second home, and he loved the freewheeling atmosphere of New York, which I guess in a parallel... Understandable. ...quite different in a sense.

And he had a family that kind of adopted him. He's the kind of person that, you know, he's got a magnetic personality. And there was a couple who he stayed with quite often who were kind of like almost like foster parents in New York, also in the garment business. And they took him to dinner one night at a retired lawyer's house. And Jimmy was trashing the Chinese Communist Party. And at the end of the dinner, his host reached over to the bookshelf and said, you know,

kind of basically like, okay, that's nice, you know, all this stuff, but, you know, read this book and get a little more structure, a little more systematic way of thinking what tyranny does. And that was Hayek's Road to Serfdom. Of course, it spoke to him because he'd come from a place where serfdom and tyranny were the rule of the road. And he'd come to Hong Kong and already by that point I believe was a millionaire had made it big.

And he saw the difference between freedom and tyranny. And Sohaya allowed him to, again, put a structure around his kind of visceral hatred of communist tyranny. And Jimmy, you mentioned he's a primary school dropout. He's a voracious reader. I think like many people who don't have a lot of formal education, he, I don't want to say overcompensates, but he really wants to make up for that. I mean, he is always reading one book or another. And obviously Hayek was a huge influence. Karl Popper and other kind of philosophers of freedom were major influences on him.

He's obviously a consummate entrepreneur. When whether he knew it or not, he's always thinking about innovation, about markets. You note in your book that he was exploring a concept that would have disrupted Hong Kong's fast food industry. But then came Tiananmen Square, the protests that occurred there, the massacre. And that seemed to change everything for Jimmy. Is that right? Elaborate on that a little bit.

Yeah, it's something I hope you have the chance to talk to him about more fully because his life before that and his life after, I mean, it's kind of a black box what happened, but he clearly, he kind of turned his back on China after he fled, not surprising. But then when the Deng Xiaoping market reforms of the 1980s started. He started doing some manufacturing there and was, I think, just so optimistic about the economic reforms that he saw coming in the Deng Xiaoping era. Then along comes the 1989 spring, the democracy spring, and he thinks, wow, at last it's happening. China's going to have freedom. First economic freedom, and we're going to get political freedom. We're going to get rid of the Chinese Communist Party.

And then bam, bam, bam, tanks, troops, people massacred. And I mean, he was just, you know, just grief struck. He had been supporting the students. He'd been selling t-shirts with the students' images, pictures on them and sending the money up to Beijing. He'd sent tents. I mean, he was like many, many Hong Kong people. He was a huge supporter of the student movement, one of the most. I mean, he was like many, many Hong Kong people. He was a huge supporter

of the student movement, one of the most prominent business people, not surprisingly. And then, after the killings, he just, I think he was absolutely bereft. Let's, you know, let's kind of circle back 36 years or so, and CNN was a pretty new force. It had just been founded in 1980s. The Tiananmen killings were almost the first time that the world watched this kind of democratic people's uprising unfolding in real time. And Jimmy, as an entrepreneur, realized that there were new technological possibilities with media, that media was going to play a really important role in shining a spotlight on the kind of corruption and abuse of tyrannical regimes. And it's interesting, this was what, five months

before the Berlin Wall came, but that wasn't on his mind. He thought, okay, I'll start with a magazine. Then he did a newspaper. He thought that media was the way that he was gonna change China. Yeah, he went from seemingly just a kind of crazy, rich Asian with a chauffeured Rolls Royce and a kind of mini zoo that included a pet bear

in his backyard. I mean, he was, yeah, living the life of a libertine, really. And Tiananmen changed that. Made him a much different, much more serious person. And around that time, and coincidentally or not, a month after Tiananmen, he met a woman who had become his second wife, his first wife had left him a couple years earlier. So I do think the personal and the political were bound up under Teresa, who he married

Teresa Lee. Under her influence, he converted to Catholicism and started down a road that I think he's still following today. It was a road that really was about a different kind of freedom. He had before experienced the freedom to work, the freedom to eat, the freedom to start his own business, the freedom to make money. After Tiananmen, it was more about political freedom, civil freedom, religious freedom, and ultimately the freedom of the love that he found in God and in Teresa.

At what point did you get to know Jimmy? Did he ever express a concern that his activism would get him in trouble? Yeah. I mean, he certainly didn't go willingly, but he went knowingly. I first met him in 1993, so he'd started the magazine. Next Magazine had been founded in 90, but he hadn't yet started Apple Daily. And he explained his whole theory, his business theory on why the newspaper was going to be so successful. And in a nutshell, Hong Kong people supported democracy, and yet all the other publishers in Hong Kong were moving away from a democratic stance because they were afraid about the Chinese takeover in 1997,

which the British had agreed to. In 1997, a few weeks before the handover, I saw him on a big stage, 500 or so people at the Grand Hyatt Hotel with Al Newhart, the founder of USA Today and long-time head of Gannett. And Jimmy broke down in tears because he said he expected to go to jail. I mean, I remember, you know, really being moved by that because I thought, wow, yeah, right, the communists are coming. You know what they're about. You know the risks that you're running. And yet you're still pushing ahead with this newspaper, this magazine, and you know it may mean a major sacrifice for you. And obviously he had more time,

perhaps than he might have imagined, but I think he had been preparing to make this sort of sacrifice for a long time. I should say, all that said, he's now in his late 70s, he's not in great health and he wants to get out. I mean, he's made the point. He'd like to get out, he'd like to be with his family. He'd like to leave Hong Kong. He clearly had the means to go anywhere he wanted and chose not to.

I think we go back to that 1997 or even when I first met him, I could see he was a man of just extraordinary principles. And I think he has three qualities that really confound the Chinese Communist Party or make him a threat. First of all, of course, he's rich, he has resources, he can hire lawyers, he, you know, he's well known because he traveled internationally. He's actually a British citizen. So he's got an apartment in London. The Communist Party has never liked rich Communist Party has never liked rich people who have independent sources of power and voice. Of course, he's a media magnate, so that kind of related to being rich, it gives him a platform, it gives him a megaphone. And of course, communists don't, you know, they think the media should be propaganda, it should serve the party. And Apple Daily, Jimmy's newspaper, Next Magazine, certainly we're not serving the party. So those are, you know, the media part, the wealth part, already those would make him a target for the communists and

other business people and media people have been targets. But above all, allied with these is he's a man of principle. And even before he converted to Catholicism, he believed in freedom, he believed in democracy, and he was a guy who just didn't really believe in compromise. And as far back as 1994, the Chinese shut down his retail shop in the Giordano clothing chain, the retail shop in Beijing, figuring that he would cave in and back off on his pro-democracy stance in the magazine. Instead, he ended up selling his share in

Giordano, the clothing company, pocketed a couple hundred million dollars, plowed it into the newspaper and doubled down. So I think a man of this kind of principle and conviction coupled with his resources and his megaphone just make him a kind of unique challenge for the Chinese Communist Party. It's something they haven't seen in their 75 years of rule. And so Jimmy's the kind of person who told associates who told him he should get out of town while it was good. He said, I'd rather be hanging dead from a lamp post in Central in the business district in Hong Kong, hanging from a lamp post in Central and to give the communists the satisfaction of saying that I ran away. He's not a guy who's going to run away from trouble.

And the problem is only intensified under this regime, Xi Jinping. Am I right? I mean, he is observing from afar a different kind of leader that China has had in the recent past, a more dangerous leader in many respects. Absolutely. When Britain agreed to turn Hong Kong back to China in 1984, the agreement was signed and took place in 1997. There were all sorts of promises under the so-called one country, two systems approach where Hong Kong could continue to have its own way of life for 50 years. Freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, all sorts of freedoms that you and I just take for granted and anybody in any open society takes for granted.

And that promise was more or less kept for a decade or so. And there was even talk, even a promise that Hong Kong people would be able to elect the members of the city council and the mayor, who they call the chief executive, fittingly. But the Chinese communists, I don't think really had any intention of living up to particularly the election part, unless they can control who was going to be elected. I think naively, they thought that the Hong Kong people would buckle and quite the contrary happened. We had millions of people out in the streets in 2014 and then again in 2019. And the biggest anti-government wave of protests that China has ever had since the communists took over. Xi Jinping, as you say, is a different leader. He took power in 2012.

The earlier a bunch of people, they might not have really liked the idea of anything like a full democracy, but they could kind of live with the chaos and the pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong. And Xi Jinping just can't deal with that. And I think we see that with his approach to surveillance and the authoritarian state in China,

of course, in Tibet and in Xinjiang, where we've had the largest incarceration of civilians since the Nazi period. And unfortunately, that kind of approach has spread to Hong Kong as well. And the idea that you could really have a free, open city, a global financial center with all the freedoms that that brings with it was just an anathema to Xi Jinping. And unfortunately, the freedom desires of Hong Kong people clash with the harsh authoritarian rule of Xi Jinping.

And unfortunately, the authoritarian side has the upper hand, at least for the moment. Do you think there's any hope for Hong Kong's democratic movement or is that as long as she's around, something that's just not going to happen? I think as long as she's around, that's something that's not going to happen. I think that's right. But the question is how long is she and how long is the Communist Party going to be around? I'm not predicting anything, but in every single free election that Hong Kong had from the kind of last days of the British period in 1991, the first territory wide elections until 2019, just before the crackdown, roughly six out of 10 Hong Kong people always voted for the pro

democracy parties, no matter how chaotic, you know, what kind of protests there have been, disruptions, there's a strong, strong bedrock of support for freedom and democracy in Hong Kong. So although hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers have left, mostly to Britain, Australia, Canada, I still think that most of the seven and a half million people in Hong Kong want the sort of freedoms that they grew up on, that they're used to, and that they've been promised by the Chinese. And one of the points that we make is that the world needs to hold China accountable for its promises. It signed an international treaty lodged at the United Nations with Britain, promising

Hong Kong people would continue to have freedom. And they've just, they've trashed, they They literally and figuratively trashed the document. They've disavowed it. So what kind of reliable partner, what kind of international player is China? Xi Jinping seems to think that China is going to lead some kind of new world order. Well, if he does, it'd be nice if he started living up to his government's own promises. Exactly. Just as an aside, those must've been very fun years for you in Hong Kong. Must've been exhilarating at the time you were there. It was, it's a fantastic city.

It's like, it was like nowhere else in the world. I, I did my undergraduate work at Berkeley. I love the Bay area. I lived in New York off and on. I love New York city and Hong Kong was this crazy amalgam. It had the bay, the water, the mountains, the wildness, and then it had this vibrant intensity and then five hours flying time to Hong Kong, you've probably had half the world's population.

You could be in Delhi, Bombay wasn't much further, Tokyo, Beijing. So it was just, yeah, incredible place. Back to Jimmy. From what you can tell, how's he doing? Well, he is spiritually, I think, extremely free and he doesn't have to worry about running his business or anything else. He concentrates on what's essentially almost the life of a Benedictine monk. He doesn't control, of course, when the lights go on. He doesn't have a clock in his cell.

He doesn't have any natural light. He's in solitary confinement. So his physical conditions are very tough. He has to do prison labor, which consists of making envelopes for like a penny an envelope. He doesn't eat well. I don't think he sleeps that well. It's hot. There's no air conditioning.

But he's spending his time reading. He reads exclusively theology and he draws and he draws exclusively religious imagery. Almost the pictures I've seen are usually Christ on the cross or the Virgin Mary and he thinks and prays and meditates a lot. So I think it's a very, very focused life, but one that has a tremendous amount of meaning for him, both because it allows him to continue his spiritual quest, but also because he's continuing to stand up for the values and the freedom that he believes in. He's made the sacrifice. He made it knowingly, consciously, and he's living with the results of it. So somebody wants to describe him as rotting in prison.

And I think that's really, that's not true. Of course, he doesn't want to be in prison. He wants to be out. He wants to leave Hong Kong and be with his family, but he's not rotting in prison. He's becoming, I think, really a more exalted person. And I think he's showing true heroism. He's just finished testifying in this long running national security law trial. It'll be five years in August since he was arrested.

The trial is still going on. We don't expect closing arguments until August, a conviction. We expect certainly a conviction in October, a sentencing at the end of the year. And he was on the stand for over 50 days. He acquitted himself admirably. He has not buckled. He hasn't caved. And so this, I believe, gives real meaning to his life. So the answer is yes and no in terms of how he's doing. I mean, he's doing horribly because he's being held in solitary confinement for over 1,500 days, and yet he's doing wonderfully in terms of his own development, conception, refinement as a human being.

And I've heard you say he's as free as he's ever been. I guess that's why. He is as free as he's ever been. And I, yeah, I don't know what else to say. Cause we all like to think that we'd be heroic in these sort of circumstances, but I don't think most of us would be able to do what he did. I mean, we have to be honest. Is he able to communicate with anyone in his family? He can, he gets very restricted family visits. He's he able to communicate with anyone in his family?

He gets very restricted family visits. He's still able to see his lawyers. Yeah, he gets a couple of visits a month with his family, most of whom are still in Hong Kong. I mean, I'm not in touch with him, partly because the Hong Kong government has decided that people like me are troublemakers who are doing things that are illegal under Hong Kong law. And he's being tried for collusion with foreign forces. So I don't really want to cause him any more trouble. You know, it's hard to have real open communication.

He's been in court for, as I said, over 140 days. So his family and diplomats and journalists can see him. We haven't actually seen a photo of him since one was surreptitiously taken by an Associated Press photographer about two years ago for her pain. She was thrown out of Hong Kong. The authorities seemed really afraid of even images of Jimmy, let alone hearing him talk or anything like that. We don't have tapes or any video from the court, although people are in the court and you know, his eyesight isn't good, he has diabetes, his health is not great, but he's acquitting himself very, very well.

I guess we've just got to continue to find ways to ratchet up the pressure. Well, again, I thank Bradley for the prize and for your interest and I think that that helps with the pressure because Political prisoners who get out usually have some sort of international campaign have people on the outside who are pushing for them We're keeping a spotlight on them. And I think he's one of the most heroic prisoners in the world today You know, we need to remember him But we also need to remember there's something like 800 other political prisoners in Hong Kong. Today, you think of this, this is a place that wants the world to think it's a global financial center that five years

ago really didn't have political prisoners. You've got 800 people now, people like not just Jimmy Lai. I was on the board of the publishing company, of the media company, and we've got six other people who have been held. They've all pled guilty. They haven't even been sentenced. They're essentially being held hostage to Jimmy's trial. And then, as I said, about another 800 people with more cases continuing to come. So, you know, it's tough. And, you know, I think particularly the idea of solitary confinement, the United Nations define solitary confinement as something that says that it's something that should only be used as a last resort, usually when there is some danger to either guards or the prisoner himself or herself, and it shouldn't be for more than 15 days.

For Jimmy, we're coming up on 1,600 days, mostly in solitary, for no reason. This is a nonviolent man who's in his late 70s, right? So what are authorities so afraid of? Why are they trying to punish him like this? They haven't let him take mass, have Holy Communion for more than two years now. Again, this flies in the face of international standards, and it also flies in the face of international standards and it also flies in the face of the promises the Chinese government made to the Hong Kong people, made to Britain, made to the international community that people in Hong Kong could continue to have freedom of worship. So you know, in every count, you know, the treatment that Jimmy is undergoing shows,

I think, the cruelty, the barbarity of the Chinese communist regime. And the sooner we can get him out, the less of a headache it's going to be for China. I really think it's in China's interest to let Jimmy and other political prisoners out. He's not going to be running Apple Daily. The presses have been sold off. The company's been liquidated. And there's no wide- scale democracy movement in Hong Kong. What is Xi Jinping so afraid of?

Why is he so afraid of Jimmy Lai and the other political prisoners in Hong Kong? I really don't have an answer because it actually seems to be counterproductive for China at this point. Yes. Last question, Mark. What do you think Jimmy hopes people take away from his story? One person can make a difference and I often heard Jimmy say, I don't know if we can change things, but if we don't try, we're definitely not going to change things. And it's not clear if Jimmy will change the course of history in Hong Kong or in China,

as I think he'd like to do, but at least he'll have the satisfaction of knowing that he tried. And I think it's just that effort. Sometimes I've had people ask me, how does it feel to be working on a hopeless cause? First of all, I don't think it's a hopeless cause. I think we can get Jimmy and others out. But even if it were, I think the effort in itself matters. I mean, the struggle against tyranny, the struggle against the Chinese communist party's just brutal oppression is something that's worth doing in its own right. Obviously, we want success. We believe we can have success, at least in the limited aspect of getting Jimmy and other

political prisoners out. But the struggle is worth it. And I think that's what Jimmy would want people to take away. Mark Clifford, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for all that you have done and continue to do to tell Jimmy Lai's story and the story of others. And let's just hope and pray that it makes a difference and that one day Jimmy Lai will once again be a free man. Thanks so much. I hope that you'll have a chance to interview him and hear it all from him in Jimmy's own words. Would love to do that.

And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. You