President Trump, fulfill your campaign promise and get Hong Kong to release my dad, Jimmy Lai — before he dies in solitary confinement 

My family used to have a Chinese New Year tradition: We would gather at my father’s house, eat radish cakes and joke about who had gained the most weight during the holidays.

Those celebrations ended four years ago. My father, Jimmy Lai, is sitting in solitary confinement in a Hong Kong prison.

He was once one of the city’s most successful entrepreneurs. He pioneered first fast fashion and then free speech in Hong Kong, as publisher of its most popular pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily.

He loved and championed the freedom Hong Kong, once a British colony, had given him to thrive as a businessman and publisher.

My dad is in jail for one simple reason: He and his newspaper fought for freedom and democracy in resistance to Beijing’s encroaching control of the city.

He is being tried under a “national-security law” China forced on the city in 2020 to criminalize free speech and suspend civil liberties. It has played a key role in the city’s repression during the last five years.

Many across the world who know his story are calling for my father’s release, and during his campaign, President Trump committed to securing it.

Now is the perfect time for President Trump to act.

My father’s show trial is quickly coming to an end, and he will undoubtedly be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Freeing him now would be a quick and easy way for the Chinese Communist Party to begin re-establishing positive relations with the United States.

The officials in Hong Kong have made their point: The persecution of my father has scared off anyone who might want to call for democracy.

Keeping a peaceful, ailing 77-year-old man in prison will only prolong the international calls for his release and highlight the government’s cruelty.

Securing my father’s freedom would burnish Trump’s growing reputation for getting things done that have eluded other presidents.

He has already managed to secure the release of several international political prisoners, and he would be a hero to many if he added Jimmy Lai to the list. Indeed, the two men are not dissimilar — successful businessmen who are brash, courageous and willing to buck orthodoxy.

My father is a British citizen. When it was clear my father’s freedom was endangered because his newspaper criticized Beijing, he could have simply moved to England. But he wanted to stand up for what he knew was right and to protect his journalists by serving as a lightning rod for the CCP’s anger.

The price has been living in inhumane conditions in solitary confinement for most of the last four years. 

He was known in the local media for being a large, imposing man. Now he is gaunt. Solitary confinement in a small, blistering hot concrete cell will do that to a man.

In what may be the authorities’ cruelest punishment for a committed Catholic, my father is not even allowed to receive communion.

But his smile of hope is still there, beaming in an otherwise dark courtroom where the government has decided to destroy the Hong Kong legal system to extinguish its citizens’ yearning for freedom.

To many in Hong Kong and around the world, my father is a hero. He symbolizes the struggle for freedom and the sacrifices it too often requires.

But to me, he is above all my dad.

He turns 78 in December. Unless something changes, he will die in prison.

After the government-appointed national-security judges shouted at him in a recent court hearing, my father replied, “In the end of the day the truth will come out in the kingdom of God, and that is good enough for me.”

We must make sure he doesn’t need to wait that long.

Sebastien Lai leads the #FreeJimmyLai campaign.