Joshua Wong, once the face of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for colluding with foreign forces under the city’s sweeping national security law.
Wong, 30, is among hundreds of campaigners and ordinary Hongkongers arrested under the law, which was imposed in 2020 following explosive pro-democracy protests against Beijing’s growing control.
Critics say the far-reaching law has silenced dissent, but authorities argue that it is needed to maintain stability and deny it has weakened the city’s cherished autonomy.
Wong, who has been in custody for the last six years, has already been imprisoned multiple times for his activism which started when he was a teen.
On Thursday, Wong arrived in court wearing a dark blue long-sleeved shirt, khaki trousers and black-rimmed glasses. He looked slimmer compared to his previous public appearances.
He nodded in greeting towards members of the packed public gallery, and took notes intermittently as the judge read out the reasons for his sentencing.
A crowd had gathered outside the court, with dozens of Hongkongers having queued for hours hoping to get a seat in the public gallery. There was also a heavy police presence.
Wong is already serving time for subversion and was due to be freed early next year when he was handed the latest charges, which he has pleaded guilty to earlier in September.
Prosecutors said that Wong had conspired with other campaigners, including self-exiled activist Nathan Law, to lobby for foreign sanctions and blockades against Beijing.
These activities took place between July and late November 2020, the court heard.
Wong and Law had been co-founders of Demosisto, a now defunct pro-democracy political party.
The charges against Wong “underscores the authorities’ fear of prominent dissidents and shows the lengths they will go to keep them behind bars for as long as possible”, rights group Amnesty International had earlier said.
Born to IT professional Roger and homemaker Grace in October 1996, Wong was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, which made him struggle with school.
However, he was quick to challenge established rules and norms when they didn’t make sense. In secondary school, he rallied with his classmates to protest against the high prices of canteen lunches on Facebook.
In 2011, Wong, then 14, co-founded the pro-democracy student activist group Scholarism, which quickly grew in size and influence.
The following year, the group rallied more than 100,000 people to protest against Hong Kong’s plans to implement mandatory “patriotic education” in schools, forcing the authorities to back down.
Wong, who was just eight months old when Hong Kong was returned from British to Chinese control, has devoted much of his life thus far towards addressing the strictures Beijing has imposed on his home city.
By 2014, Wong, who was then at the forefront of a civil disobedience movement known as the “Umbrella Movement”, had already become one of the most recognisable faces of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.
In 2016, he co-founded Demosisto with Law and Agnes Chow, an activist who is now also in exile.
But he often expressed discomfort at being labelled a “protest leader”.
“We have a lot of facilitators in this movement and I’m one of them… Instead of having a top-down command, we now have a bottom-up command hub,” Wong told The Financial Times in November 2019.
Demosisto disbanded in 2020, the year Beijing introduced the controversial National Security Law (NSL) in Hong Kong.
Law left for the UK and continued his advocacy abroad, while Wong stayed on in Hong Kong and tried to run for a seat in its legislature – but was barred, with authorities citing his opposition to the NSL as one of the reasons.
Meanwhile, the court cases against Wong were stacking up.
On 23 November 2020, he pleaded guilty to several charges related to his involvement in protests outside the Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019.
Then came the NSL charges. While still in prison in February 2021, Wong was among 47 people charged with “conspiracy to commit subversion”. The group became known as the Hong Kong 47 and remains the largest prosecution so far under the NSL.
Wong was still serving his 56-month sentence for the subversion conviction when he was charged with collusion under the NSL last year.
On 22 November 2020, the day before he pleaded guilty to the protest charges, Wong wrote in a post on Instagram addressed to “the people of Hong Kong”: “To be honest, I have never had much faith in Hong Kong’s politics, but I have every confidence in the people of Hong Kong.
“Even as political power now poses a comprehensive challenge to the resilience of our civil society, I believe the people of Hong Kong will, as always, find a way to see things through.”
