HONG KONG — He has been mocked for years in China’s state-controlled news media for being fat, which he isn’t, and denounced more recently as a C.I.A. agent, a “black hand” and a member of an American-directed “gang of four” supposedly responsible for orchestrating the Hong Kong protest movement that is now in its 12th week. He says he isn’t any of those things, either.

This week the object of all that opprobrium, Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media tycoon, rose in Chinese propaganda from the number three spot in the “gang of four” to its senior member.

That China has put much so much energy into demonizing a 71-year-old man is a measure of Mr. Lai’s singular status as the one prominent businessman in Hong Kong who openly supports antigovernment protests, routinely denounces the Communist Party leader Xi Jinping as a “dictator” and refuses to follow fellow tycoons in paying at least token obeisance to Beijing.

China’s relentless campaign of vilification against Mr. Lai took a particularly nasty turn last week when his name was purged from the genealogical records of his family across the border in southern China.