After 21 grueling months, Jimmy Lai’s national security trial is finally wrapping up in Hong Kong.

This week Lai, China’s most famous political prisoner , may finally learn whether he will ever again taste the freedoms he so passionately championed as a self-made entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and Catholic convert — and for which he is now being prosecuted.

Perhaps more importantly, the court’s sentence will also reveal how completely the Chinese Communist Party has swallowed Hong Kong .

Since 2020, the CCP has methodically chipped away at the region’s “separate system” — the social and economic order that Beijing solemnly promised to respect when Britain handed Hong Kong over in 1997.

But Lai’s arrest, and the arrests of some 2,000 other pro-democracy activists, prove how thoro

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