The lengthy trial of Jimmy Lai Chee-ying on collusion and sedition charges concluded on Dec 15, 2025, with a guilty verdict, about two years after it began. This trial has been followed intensely — and selectively — by many Western commentators and mainstream Western media outlets.

This audacious choose-and-report pattern is unsurprising. It is a technique first developed and applied long ago to empower selective Western responses to and reporting on designated adversaries.

Thus, in February 2016, The Economist candidly described the extreme overnight violence in Kowloon as the Year of the Monkey began as Hong Kong’s “worst outbreak of rioting since the 1960s”. In the next few years, however, the Western grand narrative on Hong Kong underwent a sweeping adjustment. As a consequence, the intensely more violent and damaging, multi-month “black-clad riots” that began in mid-2019, were willfully and continuously sanitized as “pro-democracy protests” by virtually all mainstream Western media outlets. They still are.

A more recent example also comes to mind. After the United States visited a wave of bombing, killing, hijacking, kidnapping, and planned looting on Venezuela, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom waited 16 hours before responding, and then advised that “at the moment, we need to establish the facts”.

About a week after this deadly, illegal American attack, Russia fired an advanced Oreshnik missile at Lviv in Ukraine. This may have been some sort of “demonstration-strike” as the missile apparently carried a non-explosive warhead. This time, the UK found there was zero need “to wait for the facts”, almost immediately expressing anger at the United Nations while calling it a “reckless attack” threatening regional and international security.

There are resonances here with a narrative device employed by Hollywood in early Wild West movies. In these black-and-white films, the heroes and the villains had to be clearly signaled, so the audience could more easily follow the story. A convention developed of having the good guys wear white hats while the bad guys wore black hats.

Several decades ago (when the British still ruled Hong Kong), as Lai’s business and political activities first began to be reported in the West, the commentary was comparatively dispassionate. Lai was, however, never “black-hatted”.

Rather than the judges presiding at the trial, it was the collective team of Western political, legal, and media commentators who prejudged the outcome of the trial as it began in 2023. Never mind the evidence, the white-hatted Lai was anointed in advance to emerge at the trial’s end as an emphatically innocent victim of a deeply prejudicial legal process

Today, when you read or hear Western coverage of Lai’s activities — and especially coverage of his recent, extensive trial — many such stories feel like they are figuratively shouting “white hat, white hat” whenever they indicate Lai and “black hat, black hat” whenever they identify Beijing and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.

This perspective helps explain something that initially puzzled me as the trial of Lai involving the Hong Kong SAR National Security Law got underway. What I found odd was the way weeks of critical testimony against Lai, presented substantially by former colleagues from The Apple Daily newspaper and others who had worked with him, went largely unreported in mainstream Western media outlets.

I conjectured, then, that this was because this testimony was too awkward. Given that these same Western media outlets had long before locked in the white-hatted Lai persona, the smart thing to do at that stage in the trial was to essentially ignore the detailed, incriminating evidence and, as needs be, smother it in gratuitous accusations attacking the trial process.

Rather than the judges presiding at the trial, it was the collective team of Western political, legal, and media commentators who prejudged the outcome of the trial as it began in 2023. Never mind the evidence, the white-hatted Lai was anointed in advance to emerge at the trial’s end as an emphatically innocent victim of a deeply prejudicial legal process.

Yet the evidence against Lai was still starkly there. And it is methodically spelled out in the comprehensive joint judgment of over 800 pages.

Some may conscientiously differ with this view, but I believe that when considered carefully, the evidence was, as the three judges eventually found, compelling. We also need to remember that the trial findings remain subject to appeal.

Meanwhile, the Western white-hat commentary on Lai is intensifying. There is, in fact, a deeper reason that extends well beyond the recent guilty verdict confirming Lai’s criminal behavior, which helps explain this.

Over the past several years, the Western, globalized, political morality template has been exposed as grotesquely compromised.

What many regard as the best humanist values gifted to the world by the Enlightenment have been incinerated in the Middle East. Israel and the US (in tandem and leading their pilot fish Western allies) have created a genocidal sea of blood and utter destruction in Gaza and beyond. The Gaza genocide is to the Global West what the Guernica atrocity was to Nazi Germany and fascist Europe almost 90 years ago, greatly multiplied.

This US-led, bombs-away approach to geopolitical decision-making and score-settling is also evident in Ukraine, where a Russian invasion was triggered by Western provocation. And now the world’s paramount hoodlum democracy is darkly menacing all non-quisling states in Latin America after the attack noted above on Venezuela.

Prominent US commentator Chas Freeman recently observed that if this pattern of appalling behavior spearheaded by the US is not stopped, “we are headed for a second Dark Age”. Ambassador Freeman also noted how the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, “has just warned us that we are in the midst of a breakdown of values that is turning the world into a den of robbers”.

Within this forbidding context, one can see why maintaining an adamantly white-hatted, democracy icon in the form of Jimmy Lai is so important: It provides something for continuing believers in the profoundly damaged Western regime of universal human rights to cling to, as that regime frighteningly crumbles around them.

The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law, Hong Kong University.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.