Joshua Wong: A Beacon Of Freedom Brought Down

Amid the raging anti-establishment protests around the world and the lingering euphoria from the spectacular repudiation last week of President Donald Trump in the US midterm elections, the chilling ten-year sentence slapped on November 5 on Hong Kong’s pioneering pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong might be mistaken for a dark relic from a bygone era. Not when viewed alongside the harsh 20-year sentence imposed this February on Jimmy Lai, a 78-year uncompromising champion of civil liberties and a media mogul whom China blames as the mastermind behind the democracy movement. Or, for that matter, the severe sentences that were handed down simultaneously against former employees of Mr Lai’s highly influential newspaper, Apple Daily, which was forced to shut down in 2021. Such has been the stranglehold Beijing’s sclerotic regime under strongman Xi Jinping has exercised on the former British colony, reunited in 1997 with China under a so-called “one country, two systems” deal, pledging western-style civil liberties for 50 years, until 2047.

On Thursday, Wong was found guilty of conspiracy to lobby foreign governments—he even testified before the US Congress in 2019—to impose sanctions against China and Hong Kong against the Beijing-inspired draconian 2020 National Security Law (NSL), which attracts the maximum penalty of a life sentence. He has been under incarceration for nearly six years, pertaining to the infamous so-called trial of 47 relating to the 2020 elections to the city’s Legislative Council when pro-democracy activists held an unofficial primary to choose candidates, drawing a high voter turnout that forced authorities to postpone the polls. The NSL is a pretext to purge the city’s opposition by criminalising citizens’ legitimate exercise of their basic rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association, Amnesty International has repeatedly emphasised. The measure is inconsistent with the high national security thresholds laid down under international human rights covenants, the organisation further pointed out.

In September, Wong pleaded guilty to the lobbying-related charges in the hope of being granted a reduced jail term. Alas! After the grim ruling last week, the once charismatic face of the mammoth 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement—named after the artefacts activists used to ward off tear gas and since a symbol of student resistance—must endure ten more years in detention. With several of Wong’s fellow activists either living in exile or having submitted guilty pleas and been acquitted, the democratic upsurge in Hong Kong has been in retreat for some years. Beijing has reacted angrily to international criticism of the latest ruling as interference in its sovereignty. A more constructive response to Beijing’s inherently authoritarian ways would be for Western powers to lead by example rather than to mouth platitudes on respect for the rule of law: simply more music to the ears of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Wishful thinking?