Claire Lai, daughter of Hong Kong media mogul turned political prisoner Jimmy lai, published a letter this weekend to Chinese Olympic champion Eileen Gu asking her to appeal to the Communist Party for her father’s freedom.
“I believe that you — a celebrated member of the Chinese Olympic team and someone deeply respected within Chinese society — could be a catalyst for a humanitarian gesture by the Chinese government,” the younger Lai wrote in the letter, published in the New York Post. “I appeal to your stated desire to be a ‘force for good.’”
Eileen Gu, referred to in Chinese state propaganda as “Gu Ailing,” is a world champion freestyle skier who has won six Olympic medals in her career, including three at the recently culminated 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. This year, Gu won two silver medals and one gold for China. Gu was born and raised in America and attends Stanford University, yet chose to compete for the Chinese Communist Party beginning with the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, an event widely condemned and protested in response to China’s ongoing genocide of Uyghur and other non-Han ethnic groups in occupied East Turkistan. Gu has consistently refused to address the human rights atrocities of her adoptive country, including declaring that the Uyghur genocide was not her “business” last week.
Despite Gu’s public embrace of the Communist Party, which issued to the 78-year-old Jimmy Lai a 20-year prison sentence this month, daughter Claire Lai wrote a cordial letter to the skier suggesting that her status as the winningest freestyle skier in Olympic history could make her influential enough to make a difference in his case.
“You have frequently expressed how your American upbringing and education instilled in you a sense of purpose and a commitment to using your platform for good,” Claire Lai wrote. “During these Games, you noted that you represent the best of the values you learned in the United States.”
The younger Lai wrote that her father, too, embraced those values, noting that he is currently in prison and suffering from significant health deterioration as a result.
“Please consider raising my father’s case with Chinese officials, urging them to allow an elderly man who simply shared your appreciation for freedom to live out his final days in peace,” she concluded. “Thank you for considering this plea.”
Once one of the wealthiest people in Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai was the owner and organizer of Next Media, which published, among other products, the hugely popular anti-communist newspaper Apple Daily. Lai has, throughout his career, been open about his background: fleeing poverty in communist China and smuggling himself by boat into Hong Kong at the age of 12. Lai is a fervent Catholic and regularly discussed his faith in public as a driver for his political activism before his arrest. In 2019, as a tide of anti-communist protests gripped Hong Kong, Lai was on the front lines marching with the city’s youth, demanding Beijing stop violating the “One Country, Two Systems” principle that it ultimately destroyed in 2020.
“The intention of the Chinese government taking away our freedom is so obvious, that we know if we don’t fight, we will lose everything,” he told CBS News’ 60 Minutes in 2019, arguing that a loss of freedom, even with financial security, is the loss of “everything” because “we are human beings, we have souls.”
Following his arrest for participating in the protests, Lai asserted that he would not flee Hong Kong to avoid imprisonment.
“If I go away, I not only give up my destiny, I give up God, I give up my religion, I give up what I believe in,” he said in an interview at the time.
The Chinese government charged Lai with breaking a so-called “national security” law that Beijing passed in May 2020, at the height of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. Under “One Country, Two Systems,” laws passed in Beijing do not legally apply to Hong Kong, but at that point the Communist Party had given up pretending that it still respected that policy. The “national security” law bans four actions: “terrorism,” “subversion of state power,” calls for “foreign intervention,” and “secession.” He was convicted of participating in a “seditious” plot by joining the protests in December and sentenced to 20 years in prison this month.
The Chinese Communist Party has aggressively defended what is a virtual life sentence for a 78-year-old, describing him falsely as the “principal mastermind and perpetrator” of the anti-communist protests and publishing a “white paper” justifying the sentence. Beijing has also entirely ignored the fact that Jimmy Lai is a dual British citizen, declaring that the imprisonment of a Chinese citizen is “purely an internal affair.” The government of the United Kingdom has expressed mild concern but done little to advocate for his release.
Eileen Gu, who has been called to advocate for Lai, has a poor record of defending human rights. Asked last week about the Uyghur genocide, a meticulously documented affair that the Communist regime openly boasts about, Gu insisted, “I’m not an expert on this.”
“I haven’t done the research. I don’t think it’s my business. I’m not going to make big claims on my social media,” she claimed, later adding that she was a “skeptic” generally and needed “a ton of evidence,” including visiting East Turkistan.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Chinese government paid Gu and another American athlete, Zhu Yi, “a combined $6.6 million.”
