The Brave Witness of Chow Hang-tung

By Mark Clifford

Crowds waited outside a Hong Kong courthouse on Friday for a verdict for Chow Hang-tung that was preordained at her arrest five years earlier: guilty of inciting subversion of state power.

The supposedly criminal act: Her pro-democracy Hong Kong Alliance held annual memorial services for those killed by their own government in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.

Only the most naive could believe that Hong Kong has a fair legal system, in which a pro-democracy advocate could have a chance of acquittal. Ms. Chow didn’t benefit from a jury trial—that constitutional guarantee has been jettisoned in favor of handpicked judges. The arrangement has helped the government secure a near-perfect record of convictions in national security cases.

The trial of Ms. Chow and other leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance produced some unexpected fireworks. The 41year-old dissident put Hong Kong’s legal system and the Chinese Communist Party on the spot as few others have.

Representing herself, Ms. Chow agreed with prosecutors that she had called for the end of one-party communist rule. But she challenged them to prove it was illegal. “The

She speaks truth to power in Hong Kong at her kangaroo trial.

key phrase in this case, ‘ending one-party dictatorship,’ is by nature a call for the rule of law. It seeks to end a state in which the party stands above the law and to restore our inherent rights, including that of democracy,” she told the court. “This is not a trial of the Hong Kong Alliance or the defendants, this is a trial of Hong Kong’s justice system.” Ms. Chow is a Cambridgeeducated geophysicist who turned to politics after the

devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed almost 70,000 people. Many of those killed were schoolchildren, victims of shoddy “tofu construction” schools built by corrupt contractors that collapsed while government buildings remained intact.

She saw that the Chinese communist political system had produced the worst of the Sichuan disaster, so she dropped out of her doctoral program to become a lawyer and activist in her native Hong Kong.

She is one of the most outspoken, articulate and stubborn opponents of Hong Kong’s government. In an earlier prosecution, in November 2021, Ms. Chow wouldn’t plead guilty to protest-related charges, refusing to “trade my honesty for freedom.” She warned authorities, “You can force on me bitter manual tasks—like washing the toilet— and smelly porridge, but you can’t force me to speak contrary to my mind. You can even force me to shut up, but you can’t force me to utter what I do not believe.”

Her closing statement in the current trial, delivered in June, posed a challenge to the Chinese party-state. “We know exactly what we want: to end one-party dictatorship, bring about a democratic transition, and effect a change of regime.”

Ms. Chow’s maximum sentence is 10 years. But she urges supporters not to feel sorry for her. “I reject the characterization of me as ‘unfortunate.’ . . . It is actually a great fortune to be able to fight for one’s own ideas. How many people in the world have such an opportunity? Against the biggest communist dictatorship in the world, no less. What a challenge.”

Mr. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.


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