Trump pledges to raise Jimmy Lai case in Xi summit talks

President Donald Trump arrives in Beijing on 14 May for a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping that may decide the fate of Jimmy Lai, the 78-year-old Hong Kong publisher serving a 20-year sentence under the territory’s National Security Law.

Trump has told supporters and lawmakers he intends to raise the case of Lai, founder of the now-shuttered Apple Daily newspaper, when he meets Xi on 14 and 15 May. The pledge has placed Lai at the centre of a diplomatic agenda dominated by trade, Iran and Taiwan, and turned the imprisoned activist into a marker for whether Trump’s personal rapport with Xi can deliver concessions on human rights.

Speaking last week on Salem News Channel, Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that “there’s a little bitterness, I would say, with him and Jimmy Lai,” confirming his intent to put the case directly to the Chinese leader. After Lai’s December conviction Trump told reporters, “I feel so badly,” and said he had instructed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to press for the publisher’s release in trade talks scheduled for June.

Bessent’s role has expanded into a parallel diplomatic track. In late April Bessent travelled to Tokyo and Seoul to coordinate trade messaging with Japanese and South Korean counterparts before the summit. The Treasury secretary will not sit at the table in Beijing, but is expected to brief Trump on the human rights and tariff asks Washington plans to make.

On Thursday, more than 100 US lawmakers in a bipartisan group sent a letter to the White House urging Trump to make Lai’s release a priority of the Beijing trip. The letter, led by Representative Christopher Smith of New Jersey and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, called the publisher’s continued imprisonment a moral test for the administration and pressed Trump to seek Lai’s freedom alongside any commercial deal.

Sebastien Lai, the publisher’s 31-year-old son, has lobbied Western governments for his father’s release for more than three years. “My father will die in prison if he’s not freed,” he told reporters this week. He argued that resolving the case was simpler than the trade and tariff disputes dominating the summit agenda, calling Lai’s release “one phone call” away if Beijing chose to act.

Lai was sentenced on 9 February to 20 years on charges of conspiring to collude with foreign forces and conspiring to publish seditious articles, the longest national security sentence handed down in Hong Kong since the law took effect in 2020. The court found that Lai had used Apple Daily to lobby Western capitals to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and Beijing officials during and after the 2019 anti-government protests. The newspaper was shut down in 2021 after authorities froze its accounts. Lai is held at Stanley Prison, where he has spent long stretches in solitary confinement.

What Beijing has signalled

Chinese officials have publicly resisted any framing of Lai’s case as a bilateral matter. The Hong Kong government has labelled the publisher the “mastermind behind the riots” and Beijing’s foreign ministry has insisted that “Hong Kong issues are internal affairs” in which “foreign interference is not allowed.”

On the eve of last October’s Trump-Xi meeting at the APEC sidelines in South Korea, however, Chinese counterparts “noted” Trump’s references to Lai without aggressive pushback, according to Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. Clifford told reporters the absence of a sharp Chinese rejoinder in October was the closest thing to an opening Beijing has offered.

Human rights lawyer Jared Genser, who has represented detained dissidents in past US-China negotiations, cautioned that the diplomatic environment under Xi is harder than under earlier Chinese leaderships. “Under Xi, China emphasises sovereignty and resisting foreign interference,” Genser told reporters, arguing that prisoner releases are now far less likely to be conceded as goodwill gestures than they were a decade ago.

What is on the Beijing agenda

The two-day summit, the first formal bilateral since Trump’s October encounter with Xi, is expected to be dominated by trade. Trump has invited a delegation of US chief executives including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods to travel to Beijing alongside the official party, a signal that Washington intends to combine pressure on chip export controls and tariffs with offers of senior commercial engagement.

Other items on the agenda include the war in Iran, where Beijing has positioned itself as a mediator, and Taiwan, where China has objected to a US arms sale package now stalled in the Taiwanese legislature. Lai’s case is, in dollar terms, the smallest item on Trump’s list. In symbolic terms it is the one with the narrowest window.

For Sebastien Lai, the calculation is sharper. Either Xi orders his father’s release as part of a wider concession, or the publisher remains in solitary confinement and a 20-year sentence runs its course. “Every day my father is alive is a day Trump can still bring him home,” he said. “After the summit, that window may close.”