Joshua Wong, who was once the face of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for colluding with foreign forces under the city’s sweeping national security law.
Wong is one of hundreds of campaigners and ordinary Hongkongers arrested under the law, which was imposed in 2020 after explosive pro-democracy protests against Beijing’s growing control.
Critics contend that the far-reaching law has silenced dissent, while authorities insist it is necessary to maintain stability and reject claims that it has weakened the city’s cherished autonomy.
Wong, who had already spent the past six years in jail and was due to be freed in January, will now spend another decade behind bars.
Wong, who turned 30 last month, has already been imprisoned several times for his activism, which began when he was a teenager.
On Thursday, he arrived in court wearing a dark blue long-sleeved shirt, khaki trousers, and black-rimmed glasses. He appeared slimmer than in his previous public appearances.
He nodded in greeting toward 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 in the hope of getting a seat in the public gallery. There was also a heavy police presence.
Wong was already serving time for subversion and was due to be freed early next year when he was handed the latest charges, to which he pleaded guilty earlier in September.
Two months and two days of the 10-year term will be served concurrently with his ongoing sentence, the judge said on Thursday.
Prosecutors said Wong had conspired with other campaigners, including self-exiled activist Nathan Law, to lobby for foreign sanctions and blockades against Beijing.
The court heard that these activities took place between July and late November 2020.
Wong and Law had been co-founders of Demosisto, a pro-democracy political party that no longer exists.
Wong’s friend and fellow activist Frances Hui, now based in the US, says she is “heartbroken” and “outraged” by the verdict.
“Today’s sentencing is not just about Joshua. It is part of a broader political crackdown that seeks to rewrite a chapter of Hong Kong’s history and erase the contributions of an entire generation who believed they could shape the future of their city,” she told the BBC.
Human Rights Watch described the verdict as “cruel and unjust.”
“To keep Hong Kong society subdued, and to reduce the chance of an international outcry, the Hong Kong government appears to have adopted the tactic of stacking charges against influential pro-democracy leaders,” said its Asia director Elaine Pearson.
The most severe penalty handed down so far under the contentious national security law (NSL) has gone to former media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison, also for colluding with foreign forces.
Born in October 1996 to Roger, an IT professional, and Grace, a homemaker, Wong was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, which left him struggling at school.
Yet he was quick to push back against established rules and norms whenever they didn’t make sense. In secondary school, he and his classmates organized on Facebook to protest the high prices of canteen lunches.
In 2011, Wong, then 14, co-founded Scholarism, a pro-democracy student activist group that rapidly expanded in both size and influence.
The next year, the group mobilized more than 100,000 people to protest Hong Kong’s plans to introduce mandatory “patriotic education” in schools, forcing the authorities to retreat.
By 2014, Wong, by then at the forefront of a civil disobedience campaign known as the “Umbrella Movement,” had already become one of the most recognizable figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.
“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 was dissolved in 2020, the same year Beijing rolled out the NSL in Hong Kong.
Law departed for the UK and carried on his advocacy from abroad, whereas Wong remained in Hong Kong and sought to contest a seat in its legislature yet he was barred, with authorities citing his opposition to the NSL among the reasons.
All the while, the court cases against Wong kept piling up.
On 23 November 2020, he entered a guilty plea to several charges stemming from his role in protests outside the Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019.
After that came the NSL charges. In February 2021, while still behind bars, Wong was among 47 people charged with “conspiracy to commit subversion.” The group came to be known as the Hong Kong 47 and remains the largest prosecution to date under the NSL.
Wong was still serving his 56-month sentence for the subversion conviction when, last year, he was charged with collusion under the NSL.
On 22 November 2020, a day before he pleaded guilty to the protest charges, Wong wrote in an Instagram post 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.”
