My daughter Alysa Lius Olympic gold means freedom and Jimmy Lai deserves no less

Hong Kong prison guards have started formally rehearsing their procedures in case of Jimmy Lai’s death behind bars.Read that sentence again.Lai, 78 years old, has spent more than 2,000 days incarcerated in Hong Kong.In February, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted under Hong Kong’s national security law.Last week, a new report from the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation found that guards at Stanley Prison have been practicing what they will do if he dies in custody.That news hits me hard — because for me, Lai’s story has never been an abstraction.In 1989, I joined the democracy movement that culminated in the protests in Tiananmen Square.After the Chinese Communist Party crushed our movement, I ended up on its most-wanted list.I was fortunate: I escaped China, came to the United States, and became an attorney.I built my life in a country where the rule of law protects the individual from the power of the state.Jimmy Lai took a different path.He stayed and built Apple Daily to champion freedom and democracy in China.And when Beijing steadily tightened its grip on Hong Kong, he refused to stay silent.Earlier this year, after watching my daughter Alysa win Olympic gold in figure skating, I found myself reflecting as never before about what freedom had come to mean to me.Alysa’s skating in Milan embodied a kind of freedom I once could barely imagine: the freedom to become yourself, to speak, to strive and even to fail without a government deciding what you are permitted to think.Lai represents the terrible reverse of that idea.His case shows what happens when the state decides that speech itself is a threat.Hong Kong authorities convicted Lai of two conspiracy counts involving collusion with foreign forces and another involving seditious publications.Beijing and Hong Kong officials maintain that his prosecution was legitimate, and that the city continues to operate according to the rule of law.That’s categorically untrue.M...