Trump promised to free Jimmy Lai. Xi’s visit is the time to do it.

I’ve spent many hours over the last few years thinking about a man I’ve never met, Jimmy Lai. A newspaperman, media mogul and democracy advocate, Lai, 78, has been languishing in a Hong Kong prison since 2020.

As the chief executive of Index on Censorship , I have spent my working life documenting how authoritarian regimes silence their critics, bend laws, intimidate journalists and shutter publications. Lai’s case is a prime example. Sometimes, I allow myself to imagine what happens when he is free. I think about his son Sebastien introducing him to his children; being reunited with his other kids, one of whom now sadly has cancer ; and finally embracing his wife, Teresa. And I think about meeting him myself.

I’ve interviewed people who know Lai, read Mark Clifford’s biography of him and published his letters in our magazine. Together they’ve created a sketch in my mind. In our imagined meeting we’d drink hot chocolate — Lai famously arrived in Hong Kong from Mao’s China, then gripped by the great famine, after a Hong Kong traveler gave him a chocolate bar as a tip. We’d discuss politics: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), certainly, and probably President Trump.

There’s a reason Trump would come up. In 2020, when Lai was still free, he told CNN that Trump was “the only one who can save us” from China. Trump, in turn, has promised to get Lai out, 100 percent. It would be easy, he said .

Now, with Xi Jinping coming to Washington on Sept. 23 , he has an opportunity to keep that promise. He must take it.

Lai is a legend — a man greater than the sum of his parts, principled to the core, with a courage few can match. He didn’t have to stay in Hong Kong, and he wasn’t naive to what doing so might cost him. Still, he felt compelled to stand alongside his colleagues and the broader protest movement. His continued incarceration, much of it spent in solitary confinement , isn’t simply an injustice against one man. It’s a measure of what’s happened to Hong Kong.

Strip away the legal scaffolding surrounding his prosecution and the reality is simple: Jimmy Lai is in prison because Beijing couldn’t tolerate the independent journalism he championed. And few championed it more loudly than he did. Apple Daily, the newspaper Lai founded, was noisy, irreverent and fiercely critical of the CCP. That made both Lai and the paper dangerous to a government that understands control of information as essential to control itself.

So the authorities made an example out of him. As the Chinese idiom goes, kill the chickens to scare the monkeys: punish one person to frighten everyone else. Except, course, they didn’t just punish Lai. They moved with ruthless precision to target his colleagues, and forced Apple Daily to close. The headline was clear to every other editor, journalist, publisher and, let’s be honest, citizen: this could be you.

I’ve spent years watching censorship work around the world. It rarely looks like a back office worker simply striking out offending words. Modern censorship uses national security laws, arrests, prosecutions, the threat of prosecution and prison. Textbook autocracy — censorship through intimidation. The aim is to make people censor themselves.

This is what has happened in Hong Kong. One of Asia’s freest media environments has been dismantled with remarkable speed.

But set aside Lai’s courage and the symbol he has become, and what remains is also painfully ordinary: an elderly man with diabetes . According to his daughter Claire, he doesn’t want to continue his activism. He just wants to spend his old age in peace with his family and his faith . Nothing grand, nothing revolutionary. Just the simple wishes of us all.

In a few days, President Xi will land in Washington, D.C., to be welcomed with the prestige and pageantry afforded to a global superpower. Trump should ask him a simple question: What kind of global superpower is so threatened by a 78-year-old newspaperman that it needs to keep him locked in a cell? Releasing Lai costs Beijing little. Keeping him imprisoned ensures he remains an international symbol of China’s fear of dissent.

Trump has shown that political prisoners can be freed when their release becomes a diplomatic priority. His administration helped secure the release of prisoners in Belarus, including Sergei Tikhanovsky , Aleksandr Lukashenko’s most high-profile opposition leader. Now he has the chance to do the same for Jimmy Lai.

I want to see the images of Lai embracing his family. I want the meeting I’ve imagined for almost six years to finally happen. There’s hot chocolate waiting.

Jemimah Steinfeld is the CEO of Index on Censorship .