Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to visit Washington next week for talks with President Donald J. Trump, with artificial intelligence, trade, investment, and the future of the U.S.-China relationship filling a crowded agenda. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich argues that Xi can do more than negotiate those items: he should arrive with imprisoned Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai and release him to his family.
Xi is reportedly traveling with a substantial delegation of Chinese business executives, a sign, in Gingrich's reading, of Beijing's interest in stronger economic ties with the United States. The primary commercial pressure on Xi is tariff relief. He wants Trump to reduce levies on Chinese goods and ease trade restrictions that Gingrich says are throttling China's economy.
The case Gingrich makes for Lai
Lai is 78 years old, a British Catholic who spent decades publishing newspapers in Hong Kong and advocating for democracy there. A Hong Kong court convicted him in December 2025 on national security and sedition charges, and on February 9 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Gingrich describes the underlying law as draconian and, at Lai's age, the sentence as effectively a life term.
He has spent more than five years in prolonged solitary confinement, and that period does not count toward the 20-year sentence. Lai reportedly has diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems, and crippling fatigue, and has been denied independent specialist medical treatment. Hong Kong authorities characterize the prosecution as a national security matter. Gingrich calls it punishment for journalism and peaceful political activity.
The international pressure for Lai's release reaches from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which has demanded his immediate release, to the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other G7 governments. Trump raised the matter with Xi at their May meeting, telling reporters ahead of it that Lai "tried to do the right thing" and that "people would like him out. And I'd like to see him get out, too."
Gingrich acknowledges that releasing Lai would not settle the summit's harder disputes: tariffs, Taiwan's independence, rare earth minerals, technology trade, industrial policy, or human rights. But it would, he writes, open the conversation on a note of good faith. Lai remains in solitary confinement, his pretrial time still uncounted against the sentence, as Xi finalizes the delegation for Washington.