In a verdict long foretold by China’s Communist Party, a Hong Kong court on Monday convicted Jimmy Lai, a media mogul and rambunctious critic of the rulers in Beijing, finding him guilty of crimes endangering national security.
The conviction, swathed in the formal garb of a nominally independent judicial system left over from British rule, was never in any real doubt. Mr. Lai, 78, has been pilloried for years by China’s ruling party and its loyalists in Hong Kong as a traitor, a crook and the leader of a subversive “gang of four” who must be severely punished.
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