The Free Press

Mention China to a typical foreign-policy “expert” on the left or right, and they’ll describe it as a formidable adversary with a chance to challenge the U.S. But that conventional wisdom is way out-of-date: Communist China’s war on the U.S. has already begun. The trick is that Beijing is trying to make sure Americans never realize they’re under attack.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is working to undermine the U.S. across economic, technological, informational, diplomatic, and gray-zone military domains. Especially since Xi Jinping’s rise, Chinese leaders have committed to diminish American superpower without triggering a U.S. military response. The Chinese don’t want a shooting war today, or ever, if they can help it. Instead, they’ve chosen to erode the foundations of American power by coercing U.S. allies, commandeering global supply chains, and bending international institutions toward Chinese interests. Beijing wants to do all this while keeping the U.S. reactive, fragmented, and unsure about how seriously to take the threat.

China’s most destructive maneuver has been to subvert the miracle of free-market capitalism by turning international investment and trade into a weapon against the U.S. and its democratic allies. Through subsidies, forced technology transfers, and state-directed investment, the CCP has planted itself on choke points in global manufacturing. That includes rare-earth minerals, battery components, active pharmaceutical ingredients, solar panels, steel and aluminum, and even advanced technologies like cutting-edge sensors.

Let’s talk about Generation Z, the youngest generation to come of age—roughly, those born between 1997 and 2012. Its members often seem like strangers in their own lands, and for good reason. Born into a maddening, disorienting virtuality, attached to smartphones from childhood, the “Zoomers” have grown up in a different country from their elders. Their homes and their schools may be somewhere but their minds are anywhere, and what should be familiar and therefore acceptable is perceived as alien and, at times, hateful.

Young men and women today are at war with the world. Deprived of the lubricant of local habits and traditions, they tend to experience reality as exasperating friction and suffer inordinate levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Their politics are outbursts of frustration. In Bulgaria, Bangladesh, Peru, Madagascar, Morocco, and elsewhere around the globe, the Zoomers have run wild in the streets.

Twenty-six Republican state attorneys general are asking the Justice Department to investigate whether two climate-focused nonprofit groups failed to disclose lobbying for China.

A letter sent Tuesday by the attorneys general cited “substantial evidence” that Energy Foundation China (EFC) and the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) “have acted within the United States as unregistered agents of foreign principals.” EFC employs former Chinese government officials, including the group’s CEO and president, Ji Zou, according to the letter, which was obtained by The Free Press. A Chinese government website shows that he worked for the state-run National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation.

On its website, EFC describes itself as seeking “to achieve greenhouse gas emissions neutrality and world-class air quality by finding and supporting solutions that help enable the transition to a low carbon economy.” The organization has held tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status since 1991 and has an office in Beijing, the website shows. An affiliate called the U.S. Energy Foundation operates primarily in San Francisco, tax records show.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where property rights are even more up in the air, Mark Carney is pitching a big tent, and we are the home of temperance-themed virtue signaling. Cheers!

Just two days after my article in The Free Press, “This Land Is Not Your Land,” warned that Canada has plunged into uncertainty about property rights because of a ruling by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, a separate court ruling on the other side of the country seemed to underline the point.

In British Columbia, a judge said in August that the Cowichan Tribes had established aboriginal title over a vast “black zone,” ruling that constitutionally protected aboriginal title is superior to fee simple property rights. Thursday’s ruling by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal confirmed the depth of the uncertainty and showed where Canada’s courts might ultimately draw the line between current property owners and indigenous groups who lived on the same land long ago.

It’s Tuesday, December 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Hadley Freeman remembers Rob Reiner—while the president mocks the dead. David Wolpe and Deborah Lipstadt on the twisted logic of anti-Jewish hate. Charles Lane on why Amnesty delayed its October 7 report. And more.

But first: The Chinese dissident Beijing can’t break.

What does a hero look like? Well, today, a hero looks a lot like Jimmy Lai.

Lai is the founder of Apple Daily, once Hong Kong’s most influential pro-democracy newspaper. Five years ago, after Chinese president Xi Jinping imposed the sweeping national security law that effectively crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms, Lai became one of the Chinese government’s primary targets. In 2020, he was arrested and sent to a maximum security prison. He has now spent over 1,800 days in solitary confinement.

On Monday, a panel of judges in Hong Kong convicted Lai, 78, of sedition and collusion with foreign forces in what was quickly condemned as a show trial. He now faces a potential sentence of life in prison in Hong Kong.

Lai became a wealthy man in Hong Kong through a successful clothing business. But after conquering the business world, he turned to journalism and publishing. As Hong Kong’s freedoms faded, Lai, a British citizen, could have fled. Instead, he stayed.

As his daughter, Claire Lai, put it to me on Monday, “a man doesn’t abandon his ship.”

“My father is a man who stands for truth. He stands for freedom of press. He stands for faith,” she said.

Today in The Free Press, we bring you two pieces from those who know Jimmy well. The first is from Claire. She writes of a father who arrived in Hong Kong with only a half-eaten chocolate bar in his pocket and found “family, God, freedom, and truth” there. But, she writes, her father is not a martyr. “He is still fighting for his life from prison.”

The second piece is from Natan Sharansky, a man who knows what it is like to face tyranny. Sharansky was imprisoned by the Soviet Union in 1977 on manufactured charges of treason and spent nine years in a gulag. He writes to his friend Jimmy, who sits alone in a cell in Hong Kong, and offers some advice: “These dictators think that you are facing a life sentence. In fact, they are the ones who will be living as slaves all their lives.” Read Natan’s full letter to Jimmy in our pages.

—Frannie Block

• Police are still searching for the shooter who killed two Brown University students and injured nine others on Saturday. Police released a second video showing the possible gunman, but are looking for more help in their manhunt.

• Ford Motor Company is scaling back much of its plans to produce electric vehicles, resulting in $19.5 billion of charges to the company’s financial statements and the halting of several electric vehicle models. “We are looking at the market as it is today, not just as everyone predicted it to be five years ago,” one Ford executive said.

• President Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC on Monday, accusing the British broadcaster of “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of the president’s remarks before the January 6, 2021 riots. The suit says the BBC “intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers.” The head of the BBC resigned last month after renewed criticism of the BBC’s coverage.

• The Australian prime minister said that he will propose stricter gun control measures in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre during a Hanukkah celebration over the weekend. The two suspected gunmen, a father-son duo, were legal gun owners. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the shooting “an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism,” and “an act of terrorism.”

• Federal law enforcement officials thwarted plans of a New Year’s Eve bombing spree, arresting four members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front—a Los Angeles–based pro-Palestinian, anti-government group—on Friday. The arrests were made as the suspects constructed and attempted to test prototype pipe bombs in the Mojave Desert, federal officials announced.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will brief members of Congress on Tuesday about the U.S.’s military strikes in the Caribbean. While confirming the briefing, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the Trump administration’s bombing of suspected drug boats “rogue and reckless.”

• The Office of Personnel and Management is launching the “U.S. Tech Force,” an initiative hiring engineers to “accelerate artificial intelligence implementation and solve the federal government’s most critical technological challenges.” The two-year program will deploy about 1,000 engineers through federal agencies in “non-partisan roles focused on technology implementation,” according to the government.

• The European Union announced new sanctions on Russian oil interests, targeting people and companies that have helped Russian firms circumvent previous Western sanctions since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The measure prohibits EU countries from doing any business with sanctioned entities. So far, the EU has sanctioned over 2,600 Russia-linked individuals and companies.

• Workers at the Louvre in Paris voted to strike, forcing a shutdown of the world’s most-visited museum. The union decried “increasingly deteriorated working conditions” and inadequate resources for security. The Louvre welcomed 8.7 million visitors last year but was targeted in a daylight heist in October. It isn’t clear when the museum will reopen.

The first time I met Rob Reiner, back in the summer of 2018, in a restaurant near his home in Brentwood, I mock reprimanded him for setting the bar too high for us, the kids who grew up on his movies. If the first comedy you watch is This Is Spinal Tap, you are doomed ever after to disappointment. “Aw, but it really was all Chris and Michael and Harry,” he insisted, referring to Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, the film’s leads. When I asked how he made arguably the only truly feminist rom-com, When Harry Met Sally, in which the male and female characters are treated equally, he protested again: “But that was all Nora!”—as in Ephron, the film’s screenwriter. “In order for it to be funny, it had to be honest on both sides, and Nora taught me how she saw men.”

Oh, how lucky were we, those of us who grew up on Rob Reiner’s movies. I was in kindergarten when This Is Spinal Tap came out, so my first Reiner movie was—of course—The Princess Bride, a movie my sister and I watched so often on our parents’ Betamax that we can still recite the whole thing. Now, my own children do the same (minus the Betamax). Next I watched Stand by Me, then Spinal Tap, then The Sure Thing, then When Harry Met Sally, then Misery, then A Few Good Men. Name another director with a run like that. That’s right; you can’t.

As much as we saw it coming, I am still grieving.

On Monday, my dad, Jimmy Lai, was found guilty by a panel of judges in Hong Kong of sedition and conspiracy to collude with foreign agents to harm Hong Kong and China. He now faces life in prison.

My dad is 78 years old. He’s been in prison for more than five years, much of which has been spent in solitary confinement without any access to sunlight. The conditions have been harsh and inhumane.

We knew this verdict was coming. My dad was tried under Hong Kong’s extremely draconian National Security Law, which was implemented by the Chinese government in 2020 to go after people just like him—people who stand for freedom and truth. The law is arbitrary, and it has an extremely high conviction rate. That’s why most people who are charged under it plead guilty.

On October 9, 2023, protesters marched in front of the Sydney Opera House chanting, “Where are the Jews?” On the first night of Hanukkah 2025, they found them on Bondi Beach—fewer than 20 miles from the opera house.

There is a difference of opinion as to whether those protesters also chanted “Gas the Jews.” (We believe they did.) But it does not matter. “Where are the Jews?” was frightening and, given recent events, telling enough.

Given Rob Reiner’s contributions to American culture—from his days as a sitcom star on All in the Family to his direction of iconic films such as When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men—it was entirely appropriate for the president of the United States to weigh in on his horrifying death over the weekend.

Sadly, the way President Donald Trump has done so is beyond the pale. His Monday post on Truth Social is worth reading in full, in part because many Republican lawmakers will spend the next few days claiming not to have seen it.

On Monday, Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and founder of the newspaper Apple Daily, was found guilty of false charges of sedition and collusion with foreign forces. He now faces a potential sentence of life in prison, after already spending more than 1,800 days in solitary confinement.

The Free Press is proud to publish a letter written by Natan Sharansky to his friend Lai. Sharansky can relate to what Lai is going through. He was imprisoned by the Soviet Union in 1977 on manufactured charges of treason. His real crime was trying to emigrate to Israel.

Below, Sharansky writes to Lai about how proud he is of him for standing up for the people of Hong Kong, and offers advice from lessons he learned in a Soviet prison. —Frannie Block