Campus & Education

In China and Hong Kong, remembrance is a crime

Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.What’s past is prologue — and talking about it might be a crime. Many of the stories I discuss in the Free Speech Dispatch address fresh cases of censorship of speech about things that are happening now: dissenters opposing a new government policy, reporters investigating uncovered corruption, protest movements suddenly flourishing, etc. But governments are sometimes just as sensitive about the past as they are the present. Today’s edition…

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Joshua Wong has spent more than 2,000 consecutive days behind bars More than a decade ago, Hong Kong watched a bespectacled teenager emerge from a student movement and become one of the most recognisable voices of his generation. Joshua Wong was barely old enough to vote when much of the world learned his name. He devoted his adolescence and then his twenties to arguing that Hong Kong people should have a say in their own future. Today, he is 29. He has spent more than 2,000 consecutive days behind bars. And after pleading guilty to another national security charge, he once again doesn’t know when – or whether –he will be free. I met Joshua in 2013, when he was 16 and I was 14. He had recently helped lead a student movement opposing the Hong Kong government’s attempt to introduce Chinese nationalist education into our schools. He was sharp, stubborn, and unapologetic. Most importantly to those of us who were younger, he seemed entirely unconvinced by the idea that being young meant we should remain quiet. Joshua Wong speaks to US congressmen in 2019 Joshua believed we had every right to speak about the future because it was our future too. He went on to become one of the student leaders of the 2014 Umbrella Movement and later co-founded Demosistō, a political party advocating self-determination for Hong Kong. Arrests, court appearances, and prison sentences gradually became part of his life. Then, in November 2020, Joshua entered prison and didn’t come home. The Hong Kong outside his cell has changed almost beyond recognition since then. Newspapers have been forced to close down. Civil society organisations and political groups have disbanded. Democracy activists have been imprisoned or driven into exile, like me. Books disappeared from shelves. People have deleted old social media posts, withdrawn from political life, and learned to choose their words more carefully. Hong Kong’s freedoms haven’t disappeared only through arrest and prosecutions. They’ve disappeared through the fear those prosecutions create. And slowly, Joshua himself has been made to disappear from everyday life. In January 2021, while already detained, he was arrested under the National Security Law for participating in an unofficial primary election held the previous year. He was eventually sentenced to four years and eight months in that case. He had been expected to complete his existing prison term in January 2027. But the authorities weren’t finished with him. In June 2025, while Joshua was still incarcerated, police arrested him again. This time, prosecutors accused him of conspiring to “collude with foreign forces” through international advocacy. He has now pleaded guilty to the charge. His sentencing remains ahead of him, and in cases deemed sufficiently grave, the offence can carry life imprisonment. It would be easy to regard this as simply another prosecution of a prominent Hong Kong democracy activist. That would miss the larger point. Joshua’s case matters not only because the authorities have deprived one man of his freedom. It matters because of what his prosecution tells everyone who once exercised the freedoms Hong Kong was supposed to protect. The prosecution has reached back into Joshua’s public life: his speeches, media interviews, campaigns, social media posts, and meetings with foreign politicians – all before the NSL existed – and presented them as the background to the charge. These weren’t secret acts. They were part of Hong Kong’s public political life. Joshua spoke openly. He met politicians openly. He gave interviews openly. He advocated internationally in full view of the government and the world. A society doesn’t have to formally outlaw every opinion to make people afraid to express one. All it has to do is demonstrate what might happen to those who speak too loudly. This is what makes Joshua’s prosecution bigger than Joshua. The authorities don’t need to imprison every young Hong Konger who attended a protest, who campaigned for democracy, spoke to a journalist or posted on social media. They only need to make an example of someone everybody remembers doing so. They know this well. Joshua was proof to my generation that a teenager’s voice could matter. His imprisonment risks being turned into proof of the opposite: that speaking can follow you for years; that yesterday’s advocacy can become tomorrow’s evidence; and that even after one sentence ends, another can be waiting in the docks. This is how censorship moves beyond newspaper offices and political organisations and takes up residence in people’s minds. People learn to silence themselves, beating the authorities to the punch. For those of us who knew Joshua when we were kids, that transformation is particularly painful. We grew up believing that using our voices was an act of citizenship, and Joshua taught us that. Joshua’s case now poses another question for us: will we learn the lesson his jailers want to teach us – or will we remember the one Joshua taught us first. Frances Hui is the policy and advocacy manager at the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. READ MORE

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