THE TROUBLEMAKER: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, by Mark L. Clifford

《麻烦制造者：黎智英如何成为亿万富翁、香港头号异议人士，以及中国最令人畏惧的批评者》，马克·L·克利福德著(THE TROUBLEMAKER: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, by Mark L. Clifford)

On the morning of Aug. 10, 2020, scores of armed police arrived at the headquarters of Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy newspapers. They rifled through the offices, hunting for evidence of treason, and frog-marched the paper’s billionaire publisher, Jimmy Lai, through his own third-floor newsroom. Lai soon faced charges under a new security law of colluding with foreign powers. A few months later, Mark L. Clifford writes in “The Troublemaker,” a brisk account of Lai’s life and work, the gravity of his predicament began to set in, and Lai sent a laconic WhatsApp message to his associates: “Delete everything.”

2020年8月10日上午，大批武装警察抵达香港最著名的民主派报纸《苹果日报》的总部。他们搜查办公室，寻找叛国的证据，押送着这家报纸的亿万富翁出版人黎智英，从他在三楼的新闻编辑室走过。根据新的国安法，黎智英很快面临与外国势力勾结的指控。马克·L·克利福德在《麻烦制造者》中写道，几个月后，他开始意识到自己困境的严重性，他用WhatsApp向同事们发送了一条简短的消息：“全部删除。”这本书对黎智英的工作和生活进行了生动的描述。

Lai has pleaded not guilty, testifying at his trial this past fall that he was simply trying to carry “a torch to the reality” of Hong Kong’s mood. His newspaper had offered robust support for the protesters in the city’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, which had decried the way Beijing was tightening its grip on the territory after taking control from the United Kingdom in 1997.

始终没有认罪的黎智英在今年秋天的审判中作证称，他所做的只是“高举火炬”传达现实中的香港的情绪。他的报纸曾大力支持2014年香港雨伞运动中的抗议者，该运动谴责北京在1997年从英国手中取得香港控制权后对它的控制日益收紧。

Since his arrest four years ago, Lai has remained in prison, often in solitary confinement. Although President-elect Trump has boasted that it will be “easy” for him to free Lai, most observers are less sanguine. Lai himself made the decision to remain in Hong Kong rather than to try to flee, knowing that he could well spend the rest of his life in a prison cell. “I called my people to fight,” Lai explained to the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky shortly before his arrest. “I can’t let them down.”

自四年前被捕以来，黎智英一直处于被收押状态中，而且经常被单独监禁。虽然候任总统特朗普夸口他可以“轻易”促成黎智英的释放，但大多数观察人士并没有那么乐观。黎智英本人决定留在香港，而不是试图逃离，他知道自己可能会在监狱中度过余生。“我号召我的人民去战斗，”黎智英在被捕前不久向前苏联异议人士纳坦·沙兰斯基解释道。“我不能让他们失望。”

“The Troublemaker” is a hagiography in the word’s original sense: Though it does not entirely overlook Lai’s warts, it ultimately presents its subject as a kind of living saint. Clifford is a former Hong Kong newspaper editor as well as a human rights advocate who served on the board of one of Lai’s companies, and he emphasizes Lai’s self-sacrifice and courage in his defense of democracy and economic freedom. Lai’s story, Clifford writes, ultimately reveals “a man who rises above the physical prison to find himself mentally freer than ever.”

《麻烦制造者》是一部圣徒传：虽然它并没有完全忽略黎智英的缺点，但最终呈现出来的还是某种在世圣人的形象。曾在香港一家报社任主编的克利福德也是人权倡导者，在黎智英的一家公司担任过董事。在书中，他突出了黎智英在捍卫民主和经济自由方面的自我牺牲精神和勇气。克利福德写道，黎智英的故事最终揭示出“一个超越了监狱牢笼的人，发现自己在精神上比以往任何时候都更加自由”。

Lai’s journey — from an impoverished childhood in China’s southern Guangdong province during the Chinese civil war era to becoming one of Hong Kong’s richest men — is a genuinely gripping yarn. Mao’s revolution in 1949 upended his family life. Lai recalls watching Communist officials force his mother to kneel on broken glass. Food was so scarce that she intentionally burned rice at the forced labor site where she was a cook so that she could bring it home to feed her children. In the worst days, Lai recalls dining on grilled field mice. At age 6, he would forage for cigarette butts, remove the tobacco dregs and sell the re-rolled product for a meager profit. His distraught father tried to hang himself in the same room where his young son was resting.

黎智英的人生旅程是一部扣人心弦的传奇，始于内战时期的中国南方省份广东省，他在那里度过了贫困的童年，后来他成为了香港最富有的人之一。1949年，毛泽东的革命颠覆了他的家庭生活。黎智英回忆说，他目睹党员干部强迫他的母亲跪在碎玻璃上。她在一个劳改地给人做饭，由于当时食物极其匮乏，她故意把米饭烧糊，这样就能带回家，让孩子们有口饭吃。黎智英记得在最艰难的日子里，自己还吃过烤田鼠。六岁时，他会去捡烟头，把烟叶残渣搜集起来，然后重新卷成烟再卖，赚取微薄的利润。他的父亲痛苦不堪，曾经试图在小儿子正在休息的房间里上吊自杀。

At 12, Lai decided to steal away to Hong Kong. He worked in factories and lost a fingertip. Dominated by the British since the 19th century, the colony was suffused with Anglo-European culture. “I noticed that everybody who made it spoke English,” Lai recalled. He listened intently to Voice of America and browsed the dictionary in his free time.

12岁时，黎智英决定偷渡到香港。他在工厂打工，失去了一个手指尖。在这个自19世纪以来一直由英国统治的殖民地，英欧文化无处不在。黎智英回忆道：“我注意到，所有的成功人士都说英语。”空闲下来的时候，他会认真收听美国之音，翻阅字典。

Lai eventually came to run his own factory and hustled amid the American department store buyers looking for low-cost suppliers, making his early fortune in fast fashion. He became an evangelist for what he called “Western culture and values and institutions,” handing out copies of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” and eventually befriending the classical-liberal economist Milton Friedman.

黎智英最后自己开起了工厂，在寻找低成本供应商的美国百货公司买家之间奔波，在快速时尚领域赚到了第一桶金。他成为了其所谓的“西方文化、价值观和制度”的传播者，买来哈耶克的《通往奴役之路》四处送人，还成为古典自由主义经济学家米尔顿·弗里德曼的朋友。

Although Clifford does not dwell on it, Lai also began to display some of the uglier characteristics of unbridled capitalism. A few years after founding his first retail chain he was being driven around in a golden Rolls-Royce and keeping a private zoo filled with, Clifford writes, “peacocks, a flying fox, deer, a monkey and a pet bear who liked to drink cream soda.”

虽然克利福德没有用更多笔墨去说明，但黎智英也开始表现出无节制的资本主义的一些丑陋特征。在创立了他的第一个零售连锁几年后，他开着一辆金色的劳斯莱斯四处兜风，还拥有一处私人动物园，克利福德写道，里面“有几只孔雀、一只果蝠、鹿、一只猴子和一头喜欢喝奶油苏打水的宠物熊”。

Lai’s journalism, too, was marked by a kind of prurient excess. At the publications he started — Next magazine and the tabloid Apple Daily — he bought his paparazzi scooters, the better to arrive at car crashes while the bodies were still warm, and his paper featured detailed, user-friendly reviews of Hong Kong’s bustling prostitution scene.

黎智英的新闻事业同样带有过于低俗的色彩。他创办了《壹周刊》和小报《苹果日报》，为狗仔队购买摩托车，这样他们就能第一时间赶到车祸现场拍摄尸骨未寒的死者；他的报纸还对香港繁华的卖淫业做出了详尽的、迎合嫖客的描述。

Yet after Beijing’s 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, Lai discovered a new sense of mission. “I didn’t feel anything about China until Tiananmen Square happened,” Lai told an interviewer. “Suddenly it was like my mother was calling me in the darkness of the night and my heart opened up.” Lai built a network of relationships with pro-democracy activists and Western power players. By the time the Umbrella Movement erupted, Lai was out on the streets with the other protesters, holding court from a lawn chair by a KFC restaurant.

然而，1989年北京镇压天安门广场抗议者后，黎智英发现了一种新的使命感。“在天安门事件发生之前，我对中国没有任何感觉，”黎智英在接受采访的时候说。“突然间，就像母亲在黑夜里呼唤我一样，我的内心打开了。”黎智英与民主活动人士和西方权势人物建立了联系。当雨伞运动爆发时，黎智英和其他抗议者一起走上街头，坐在一家肯德基餐厅旁的草坪椅上主持大局，成为公众关注的焦点。

Despite Lai’s evident courage and resourcefulness, there is something slightly unsatisfying about Clifford’s portrayal of him as a martyr for capitalism and the Western way. We now know all too well that the kind of free-market fundamentalism that Lai espouses can lead to the inequality that fuels xenophobic nationalism. The Western world itself is now led by a man who is starting to use lawsuits and intimidation to cow the press. Among the unexpected victims in Clifford’s tale are the “Western values” for which Lai has sacrificed so much.

尽管勇气可嘉且足智多谋，但在克利福德的笔下，黎智英是资本主义和西方路线的殉道者，这一点让人略感不满。我们现在已经清楚地看到，黎智英所信奉的那种自由市场原教旨主义会导致不平等，从而助长仇外的民族主义。眼下的西方世界领袖，正是一个开始利用诉讼和恐吓来压制新闻界的人。克利福德所讲述的故事有一些意想不到的受害者，其中就包括黎智英为之付出巨大牺牲的“西方价值观”。

THE TROUBLEMAKER: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic | By Mark L. Clifford | Free Press | 264 pp. | $28.99

《麻烦制造者：黎智英如何成为亿万富翁、香港头号异议人士，以及中国最令人畏惧的批评者》，马克·L·克利福德著，Free Press出版社，264页，定价：28.99美元