MORNING GLORY: Will Xi free Lai?

General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping is as known a quantity as is possible for a totalitarian dictator to be known.

Xi is the absolute ruler of the second most powerful nation state in the world. As the dictator-for-life of the nearest nation to the United States in terms of economic and military power, Xi has repeatedly demonstrated in ways large and small that his control of everything and everyone in the People’s Republic of China is complete.

When he sits down opposite of President Donald Trump in the days ahead, Xi will be facing the only person on the planet with more power at his disposal than Xi himself wields, and will do so with the knowledge that President Trump’s time in that position is limited to less than three years while Xi’s is limited only by his own lifespan.

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It is highly likely that a less formidable opponent to Xi will take over the United States government in January, 2029. So why would Xi do anything at all next week that would signal anything other than stubborn strength during or after the upcoming summit?

There are at least two considerations that might yield some significant flexibility on Xi’s part.

First, if Xi cares at all about reducing the enduring global awareness of his ruthlessness, he could release prisoners of significance in the world’s opinion like Jimmy Lai, once a powerful media tycoon in a free Hong Kong. Lai’s imprisonment has served to underscore Xi’s crushing of dissent, his cruelty, and his thoroughness in communicating that message to his own population even at the cost of anchoring the deeply negative perception of him in all of the free world and in history.

Xi’s indifference to that perception is obvious as his treatment of the Uyghurs demonstrated. But perhaps there is a small chance that the Leninist who is almost certainly an atheist may not care about eternity and its judgments but if there is even a small bit of concern on his part about history’s or a deity’s assessment of him, that would be an incentive to use this biggest of stages to lay down a marker on being other than absolutely evil.

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Jimmy Lai is far from the only high profile political prisoner in Xi’s country-wide cell. Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri is another and there are scores more. The release of the publisher or the pastor and any of the scores known by name would oblige historians to account for even a small flicker of humanity in the dictator. Does Xi care about that? Or has he reached a Putin-level of indifference to basic human norms?

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Second, if Xi for any reason wants to provide President Trump with a visible and enduring achievement, he will send Lai and others into exile from China via Air Force One. There is a long list of "asks" that Xi could request of Trump, and the president and his advisors would have to assess the cost of any concessions against the benefit of an extraordinary victory for endurance — if only in the West. President Trump should value a release of symbols of universal human rights very highly. There is great value as well in Xi’s rejection of the request for Lai and others. An accurate assessment of our greatest adversary is pieced together from refusals on such small matters as the fate of one man.

Such occasions as the freeing of a political dissident are of far more significance within free societies than they are of consequence in totalitarian ones. The populations in countries without freedom may become aware of an act of mercy eventually, but it will hardly matter in the course of their country’s evolution. Political earthquakes are not triggered by acts of mercy.

But reassessments of rulers are influenced by such steps. Hitler had Bonhoeffer executed. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from his internal exile in 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Leonid Brezhnev exiled the genius to the West. Mikhail Gorbachev freed Natan Sharansky.

History remembers.

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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