The prison sentence handed down to Jimmy Lai is likely just the beginning of the punishment the Chinese communists are going to mete out to the hero of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. The 14-month stretch he’s just drawn is for participating in a peaceful demonstration by thousands. He still faces charges for fraud and violating the national security law. The 73-year-old family man may yet perish in prison.

We don’t know Mr. Lai well. The last time we conversed with him was in 2005 at a dinner honoring Milton and Rose Friedman and their idea of school choice. The several glancing encounters we’ve had with Mr. Lai over the years, though, leave us with an indelible impression of an extraordinary spirit — filled with an appreciation for the fact that economic prosperity depends on political liberty as much as economic liberty.

This principle is the Achilles heel of communist China. Its hubris is that it will be able to realize its ambition for prosperity without political liberty. We’ve watched one regime after another pursue that illusion. None attained stability. The regime in Beijing is a classic. It has a veneer of stability. Its leaders, though, are afraid of Hong Kong and the free Chinese republic on Taiwan. They’re afraid of freedom and its tribunes.

Mr. Lai once told us that a secret to the success of his newspaper — Apple Daily — was that he surveyed his readers after every edition. And responded to their feedback. Not that he abandoned his political principles or the exigencies of news. What we took his point to be was that as important as getting your own views across is making an effort to listen to readers. He is a listener in opposition to a top-down regime.

One of the stories we most remember from our own years as an editor in Hong Kong was turned in by a Wall Street Journal reporter named Frank Ching. It reported on a closed-door dinner hosted in the late 1970s at Hong Kong by the editor of the Chinese news agency Xinhua. His guests were editors from the several pro-communist papers in the British colony. The message from Xinhua’s editor was astonishing.

He told his colleagues that if small countries like South Korea and Taiwan could succeed the way they did, there was no reason why a large country like China couldn’t do the same. It was a major scoop, an early signal that the communist mandarins were going to try to open up their economy. Xinhua’s editor, though, missed the part about how South Korea and Taiwan eschewed communism in favor of democracy.

Democracy, it turns out, has been Jimmy Lai’s greatest scoop. The journalist closest to him, Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, has a video up today, showing Mr. Lai being led away in handcuffs after his initial arrest. Mr. McGurn, who covered Hong Kong for years, reckons that every man and woman in China sees the handcuffs as a badge of honor. It’s hard to think of many, if any, newspaper proprietors as gutsy as Jimmy Lai.