Jimmy Lai’s journey from impoverished migrant to media magnate is the stuff of legend in his native Hong Kong. Yet when asked whether his parents supported his decision as a 12-year-old to leave communist China in 1960, then in the grip of a famine brought on by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, for Hong Kong, Mr Lai is still moved by the memory of his mother fearing she would never see him again.

“My mother said, ‘If you go to Hong Kong, it’s like going to the moon’. No parent would like their children to go where they can’t go [to see them]. But nothing is scary to a 12-year-old.”

Carrying passengers’ luggage in Guangzhou railway station from the age of nine gave him a taste of the outside world and made him determined to emigrate. “I had access to people who travelled to Hong Kong. I knew the outside world was a beautiful world compared with China,” he says.