I once sat with Jimmy Lai on a remote Hong Kong beach as he told me the story of his life.

我曾与黎智英共坐在香港一处僻静的海滩，听他讲起自己的人生故事。

How his mother had been taken to a labor camp after the Communist Party came to power in mainland China. How a taste of chocolate given to him by a passenger from Hong Kong had inspired him to stow away on a boat to the British colony. How he had worked his way up from the floor of a glove factory and how he had started Giordano, the casual clothes maker, the name inspired by a napkin from a New York pizza shop. How the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre galvanized his political activism. How he had started the pro-democracy newspaper The Apple Daily with the slogan “An Apple a Day Keeps the Liars Away.”

共产党在中国大陆掌权后，他的母亲被抓去劳改。一位香港乘客给他巧克力吃，激起他乘船偷渡到这个英国殖民地的决心。他从一家手套厂的底层工人做起，白手起家，创办了休闲服饰品牌佐丹奴——品牌名字的灵感来自纽约一家披萨店的餐巾纸。1989年天安门广场大屠杀激发了他的政治积极性。他创办了民主派报纸《苹果日报》，口号是“每日一苹果，冇人呃到我”。

“I believe in the media by delivering information, you’re actually delivering freedom,” Jimmy told The Times in 2020. It’s as precise a defense of an independent press as I’ve ever seen.

“我坚信媒体传递信息，本质上就是在传递自由，”2020年，黎智英对时报说。这是我见过的为独立媒体所做的最精确的辩护。

From the beach we went for lunch and talked about politics, political philosophy and religious liberty. That was in 2009, a few years after Jimmy had won a showdown with the Hong Kong government over a proposed security law that would have gutted Hong Kong’s freedoms — freedoms that were supposedly guaranteed for 50 years after Britain returned the territory to China in 1997 under the promise of “one country, two systems.”

从海滩离开后，我们一起去吃午饭，畅谈政治、政治哲学与宗教自由。那是在2009年，距他与香港政府就一项安全法提案展开对决并获得胜利，仅仅数年时间——该法案如若实施，将会掏空香港的自由，而在1997年英国根据“一国两制”承诺将香港归还给中国后，这些自由理应得到为期50年的保障。

But it was clear then that Beijing had no intention of keeping its word, and it became clearer after Xi Jinping came to power and accelerated the regime’s assault on Hong Kong’s rights. That culminated in mass protests in 2019 against a heavy-handed extradition law, a violent police crackdown, Jimmy’s arrest the next year and the closing of The Apple Daily the year after that.

但当时北京显然无意遵守诺言，随着习近平上台后加速推进对香港权利的打压，这一点变得更加明显。这最终导致了2019年抗议严苛引渡法的大规模抗议活动，警方进行了暴力镇压，次年黎智英被捕，再过一年，《苹果日报》也被停刊。

On Monday, Jimmy, who has already spent five years in solitary confinement, was sentenced to a 20-year term, a de facto life sentence for an unwell man of 78. Six former Apple Daily senior staff members also received lengthy prison terms. The most generous interpretation of the decision is that Xi intends to use him as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations when he next meets President Trump in Beijing in April. Less generously, that it is simply the reality of a China that has reverted to type under its Maoist leader.

本周一，已被单独监禁五年的黎智英被判处20年有期徒刑，对于一个78岁的病弱老人来说，这几乎等同于无期徒刑。六名前《苹果日报》高级职员也被判长期监禁。对于这一判决，最宽容的解读是，习近平打算在今年4月与特朗普总统在北京会面时，把黎智英作为贸易谈判的筹码。若按不那么慷慨的解读，这不过是毛泽东主义领导人治下的中国重回本色的现实写照。

But there’s another side to this story, equally dismaying, which is the abandonment of dissidents as a public cause in the West.

但是这个故事还有同样令人沮丧的另一面，那就是西方已经放弃，不再将捍卫异见人士作为一种公共事业。

Fifty or 40 years ago, the free world cared profoundly about names like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Sharansky in the Soviet Union, or Biermann, Havel and Walesa in the captive states of Central Europe. As late as 2007, George W. Bush attended a conference of dissidents in Prague, underscoring their importance to an American foreign policy that paid more than mere lip service to the cause of free societies.

50或40年前，自由世界曾对苏联的索尔仁尼琴、萨哈罗夫、沙兰斯基，以及在中欧国家被囚禁的比尔曼、哈维尔、瓦文萨等人深深关切。直至2007年，乔治·W·布什还出席了在布拉格举行的异见人士会议，彰显了这些人物对美国外交政策的重要性——它对自由社会事业的支持绝非仅限于口头承诺。

That changed after 2008 when realpolitik — never absent from U.S. foreign policy — roared back. People associated Bush’s “freedom agenda” with the Iraq war, seeing the former either as a cynical cover for an immoral war or as an expensive American delusion that we could plant democracy in barren soils. In 2009, Hillary Clinton went to Beijing as secretary of state and declared that China’s human-rights issues “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises.”

2008年后，局势骤变，美国外交政策中从未缺席的现实政治强势回归。人们将布什的“自由议程”与伊拉克战争联系起来，认为这种议程只是为不道德战争披上的虚伪外衣，抑或是美国试图在贫瘠土壤播撒民主的昂贵幻梦。2009年，时任国务卿希拉里·克林顿访华时宣称，中国的人权问题“不能干扰全球经济危机、全球气候变化危机和安全危机”。

In other words, there was more important business to transact.

换言之，还有更重要的交易要达成。

Under Trump, U.S. policy became that much more transactional and immoral. The president justifies his chumminess with Vladimir Putin by claiming a moral equivalence between Russia and America — “What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?” as he told Bill O’Reilly of Fox News in 2017. And for all of Trump’s talk about running Venezuela, the regime continues to imprison its political opponents while the administration treats the country as an oil play.

特朗普执政期间，美国政策变得更加功利且不讲道义。这位总统以美俄道德上并无差别为由，为自己与普京的亲密关系辩护——2017年他对福克斯新闻的比尔·奥莱利说：“你以为呢？我们国家就那么无辜吗？”尽管特朗普口口声声要管理委内瑞拉，该国政权仍在继续囚禁政治对手，而美国只把委内瑞拉视为掠夺石油资源的对象。

What this crass worldliness misses is that human-rights issues typified by cases like Jimmy’s aren’t distractions from more important business. They are the business.

这种粗俗的世俗眼光忽略了这样一件事——黎智英这样的案件所涉及的人权问题并非对更重要事务的干扰。它们本身就是要务。

Our confrontation with China today (like our confrontation with Russia, or with the Soviet Union in the Cold War) is not over terms of trade or maritime and territorial disputes. They are about the place of personal liberty in the political order. Every other issue is downstream from that. Respecters of liberty will find ways to work out their differences peacefully. Non-respecters won’t. Any agreement the West signs with Xi or Putin will ultimately be violated the moment it becomes inconvenient to them.

我们今天与中国的对抗（就像我们与俄罗斯的对抗，或冷战时期与苏联的对抗一样）并不是为了贸易条件或海洋和领土争端。其本质在于个人自由在政治秩序中的地位。其他所有问题都由此衍生。尊重自由的国家会寻求和平解决分歧的方法。不尊重自由的国家则不会。西方与习近平或普京签署的任何协议，一旦对他们造成不便，最终都会被违反。

Ditto for Trump — as our trade partners and treaty allies have all found out over the last year.

特朗普也是如此——我们的贸易伙伴和条约盟友在过去一年里都深有体会。

Marco Rubio issued a brief statement on Monday asking China to grant Jimmy a “humanitarian parole.” It won’t do. What Jimmy needs isn’t the mercy of a totalitarian state. It’s a global campaign on his behalf by decent people who understand that in dissidents like him rests the case for human freedom, its nobility and necessity, against remorseless foes. They understand, too, that those dissidents are also the free world’s most effective weapon, because nothing is more dangerous to a dictatorship than the marriage of courage and conscience in the hearts of its own people.

鲁比奥周一发表简短声明，要求中国给予黎智英“人道主义假释”。这远远不够。黎智英需要的不是极权国家的怜悯，而是全球正义之士为他发起的声援运动，这些人明白，像他这样的异见者是人类自由的捍卫者，彰显着自由在冷酷敌人面前的崇高与必要性。他们同样明白，这些持不同政见者是自由世界最有效的武器，因为对于独裁政权来说，最危险的莫过于国民心中勇气与良知的结合。

One day, hopefully, we’ll have an administration that gets this.

希望有一天，我们将迎来能够明白这一点的政府。