As British Prime Minister Keir Starmer traveled to China amid renewed calls to press Beijing on human rights, Claire Lai, daughter of imprisoned Catholic media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, marked the moment in prayer at a snowy Washington Mass.
The Jan. 27 liturgy fell on the feast of St. Angela Merici, whose witness to trust in divine providence offered Claire spiritual consolation as she awaited news of her father’s fate.
“She wasn’t actually a saint that I was very familiar with to my shame,” Claire Lai told OSV News Jan. 29. “But the homily focused very much on trust in divine providence and doing God’s will regardless of the circumstances, and trying to figure out how it is that God wants us to to serve him.”
St. Angela Merici — 16th-century inventor of what we today call secular institutes — was struck with blindness during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1524. “She proceeded to visit the sacred shrines, seeing them with her spirit. On the way back while praying before a crucifix, Angela’s sight was restored,” according to Franciscan Media website.
Claire admitted that while she “had this certain unease — I wanted to be hopeful, but not too hopeful in a certain sense,” about securing her father’s release by Prime Minister Starmer, she told OSV News that’s “exactly what I needed to hear on that day” — the story of St. Angela Merici. “And I think that’s also exactly what my dad would have said … that he’s in our Lord’s good hands and that we should trust.”
The British prime minister began his official visit to China on Jan. 28 — the first trip to the country by a U.K. leader in eight years — amid calls to press on human rights issues with China’s President Xi Jinping.
As he was preparing to leave London, the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, or CFHK, staged large-scale wall projections on London’s Tower Bridge and the Houses of Parliament “with a clear message for Prime Minister Keir Starmer ahead of his trip to Beijing this week: Bring British citizen Jimmy Lai home,” CFHK said on its website.
“The projections highlighted the awful reality of how long Lai has been languishing in a Hong Kong jail: 1,854 days,” the foundation’s website said.
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai has been convicted of national security offenses under the city’s controversial national security law that human rights advocates call “draconian.”
Following his Dec. 15 conviction, the 78-year-old British citizen faces the possibility of life in prison and is expected to be sentenced in early this year.
As he arrived in Beijing, Starmer has said he will “raise the issues that need to be raised” on human rights with China’s president, according to The Guardian, with BBC later reporting Starmer told journalists he “raised those issues as you would expect.”
Asked how forcefully he raised the case of Jimmy Lai and the treatment of Uyghurs — as China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity against their population — Starmer said: “Part of the rationale for engagement is to make sure that we can both seize the opportunities that are available — which is what we’ve done — but also have a mature discussion about issues that we disagree on.”
Asked if China was listening to him, the prime minister added: “Yes, we did have a respectful discussion about that,” BBC reported.
On Jan. 29, China has agreed to allow British citizens to travel to the country for up to 30 days without a visa, Downing Street said after Starmer’s meeting with President Xi in Beijing. Starmer also secured a deal to cut import taxes on U.K. whisky from 10% to 5%, with the trip’s spotlight on closer trade ties with China to help boost the British economy.
“It is really quite outrageous that securing visa free travel for British people is considered a win when as the example of my father shows — China is engaged in hostage diplomacy,” Claire Lai commented, adding that while the British prime minister said the relationship with China is “in a good strong place,” for China the engagement with the U.K. is just “unavoidable.” but
“If the prime minister of Great Britain cannot respect its own nation and citizens, including those being held hostage, how can one expect a country like China to respect him and Britain,” she said in an emotional plea.
“This trip is a huge gift to China,” Claire Lai told OSV News, stressing it is following “several concessions, including the mega embassy” — referring to a controversial diplomatic base the British government approved in the Royal Mint Court in London. It stirred controversy over a 208-room underground complex beneath the embassy, which experts say could be used for espionage practices.
“I won’t sit here and say” that Britain “shouldn’t have a certain trading relationship with China,” she continued. “What I’m saying is that from sovereign to sovereign, a good building block for trust — which is necessary in these kinds of relations — would be a gesture of good faith. And what better gesture of good faith than having (President Xi) release my father, who is a British citizen, and who’s in jail for standing up for values that Britain still holds.”
“It’s not in China’s interest to keep my father behind bars,” Claire Lai told OSV News.”If he dies, he will die a martyr. And this is a chance for China to do the just and honorable thing.”
Jodie Ginsberg, an American journalist and chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in her Jan. 28 editorial in The Telegraph that “British freedoms made Jimmy Lai’s success possible — Starmer must demand the Chinese release him.”
Sebastien Lai, who along with his sister advocates for their father’s freedom, told The Times Jan. 29 his father’s release was a critical part of resetting relations with China.
“If you are talking about the normalizing of relationships, that cannot happen until my father is free,” he said in a story featured on the cover of the iconic British daily. “What’s happening to him, this cruel treatment, that is not something we ever want to normalize, especially since he was standing up for the values that we hold dear.”
Claire Lai added in a conversation with OSV News: “It would be a huge shame, it would be a huge indication of what China thinks of us if they can’t even get that concession. I mean, it is one man.”
Echoing her brother’s Jan. 28 editorial in The Independent, Claire Lai told OSV News, “A nation is measured by its ability to defend its citizens,” and Jimmy Lai is a British, not Chinese, citizen.
For decades, Lai, who founded the now-defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, campaigned for freedom of the press and freedom of expression in Hong Kong, which was designated a Special Administrative Region of China in 1997, when British rule ended after more than 150 years. Hong Kong’s Basic Law was supposed to allow the region “to exercise a high degree of autonomy and enjoy executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication.’
Claire said her father “suffers from health issues” ranging from hearing, eyesight and diabetes to heart problems, infections and heat rashes. “He is kept in solitary confinement,” she said, adding that “the conditions in which he’s been kept have only just gotten worse,” where “he doesn’t have fresh air or natural sunlight” in prison.
Jimmy Lai’s daughter said that her hopes are high also before the April visit of President Donald Trump to China. “We are extremely grateful to President Trump and his administration,” she said. “They have proven that they have a track record of freeing the unjustly detained, and we do hope our father is next.”
She said she’s also grateful for prayers that she’s assured of from people around the world.
“So many people have told me that they are praying for my father, and we are so humbled and we are so grateful. Their prayers definitely sustain him and sustain our family.”
“A while ago, in one of the interviews, I was asked whether or not I felt powerless,” she told OSV News. “And I hadn’t really thought about it until I was asked that question because as much as I want to physically go and just lift my father up from jail and bring him home with us, as Catholics, what we seek isn’t power. It’s salvation. And my father … from basically his first day in prison, he has found ways to serve our Lord. I find a huge deal of comfort in that.”
Claire Lai said her father always ends his letters to her with a prayer: “He just wants to offer it to God,” she said. With “everything that happened in the last five years,” her father “never dimmed his faith,” she said.
“So, you know, after going to Mass that day,” when the British prime minister was flying to China, “I prayed that whatever happens, even if it’s a disappointment — that God gives me the strength to persevere.”
After Mass, she prayed St. Jude Thaddeus novena with the faithful in the Washington church.
“It allowed me to know that regardless of the outcome, we trust in God’s divine providence, his will and at the end of the day, our faith rests in God and not in a regime or a person.”
Claire Lai concluded: “I am grateful I went to Mass on Tuesday, easing the doubts I had and reminding me of my father’s unwavering faith. I will start a novena of Confidence to the Sacred Heart tonight. All the strength that I have comes from God and the strength that I need will be provided by Him in the challenges to come.”
