President Donald Trump will press Chinese President Xi Jinping for the release of Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai when the two leaders meet in Beijing next week, according to Trump’s own public statements and briefings by advocates working for Lai’s freedom. The imprisoned media mogul’s family sees the summit as possibly the last, best chance to free the 78-year-old before he dies in custody.
Lai, founder of the now-shuttered Apple Daily newspaper, was convicted last year of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiring with others to publish seditious articles. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison under the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020 following massive anti-government protests in the city. Lai has not appealed the conviction, and the Hong Kong government is separately seeking to confiscate his assets.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Sebastien Lai, Lai’s 31-year-old son, said the family is counting on Trump to secure his father’s release. “It’s easier to resolve than many of the other complex geopolitical issues the leaders will discuss,” he said. But he fears his father — who suffers from heart palpitations and diabetes, according to a January statement from his legal team — will not survive. “My father will die in prison if he’s not freed,” Sebastien Lai said. “The Chinese government would be complicit in killing him.”
The summit, which aides say will also cover trade, the Iran war, and Taiwan, comes after months of quiet diplomacy. Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he had “a little bitterness” with Xi over Lai’s case and that he planned to bring it up. He previously raised the matter during an October meeting with Xi and, according to Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, Xi and his staff “noted” the remarks without pushing back aggressively.
Clifford said people with direct knowledge told him that Trump also instructed U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to raise Lai’s release during trade talks last June and that Bessent again mentioned it in a recent meeting, where Chinese representatives acknowledged the issue “without much comment.” The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Publicly, Beijing remains unyielding. In March a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson called Lai the “mastermind” behind the 2019 Hong Kong riots. On Thursday the ministry’s spokesperson’s office declined to say whether China would consider releasing Lai, reiterating that Hong Kong matters are internal affairs. The Hong Kong government added that Lai was convicted after an open and fair trial and that the government would enforce the law strictly.
On the same day, more than 100 U.S. lawmakers from a bipartisan group sent a letter to the White House urging Trump to seek Lai’s release at the Xi summit. The White House did not answer questions about how vigorously Trump would press the case.
The push for Lai comes against a backdrop of limited recent successes in freeing political prisoners. In 2024, U.S. pastor David Lin was released after nearly 20 years in Chinese custody, and Washington and Beijing exchanged several other prisoners under a diplomatic agreement that year. But human rights lawyer Jared Genser, who worked on the Lin case and previously represented the late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, said Beijing has grown more resistant to releasing prisoners who have confronted it over human rights.
Under Xi, Genser said, China emphasizes sovereignty and resisting foreign interference far more than it did under President Hu Jintao, when Beijing was more focused on economic integration and sensitive to its international image. “That self-censorship to me is the biggest factor in our inability to secure the release of political prisoners under Xi,” Genser said.
John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, which advocates for political prisoners, said China has previously made concessions when it wanted something, such as hosting the Olympics, but that U.S. inattention also makes it harder to win releases. “I don’t know of anyone in this administration who cares about political prisoners in China,” Kamm said, with the possible exception of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose focus he said is elsewhere.
Thomas Kellogg, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, said both sides have incentives to make a deal. Releasing Lai would let China signal it is ready to move on nearly six years after imposing the security law, while the Trump administration could claim a diplomatic win. “If the Trump administration is pushing very hard for Jimmy Lai’s release, then we could get a positive outcome,” Kellogg said. But Wilson Chan, co-founder of the Pagoda Institute think tank, said the chance of a diplomatic solution is slim because Beijing has a message to send through Lai’s case — and if the international community keeps raising it, Beijing may view Lai as a continuing threat. If they don’t, Beijing faces no pressure to act.
Sebastien Lai, speaking from London where he lives, said his father — who holds British citizenship but whom China regards as a Chinese national — would likely seek a quiet life if released. But after more than five years in custody, with communication limited to letters, he fears time is running out. “My father will die in prison if he’s not freed,” he repeated. “It’s a lose-lose scenario for every single person.”