Joshua Wong's Freedom Means More Than Cheap Chinese Cars
Takeaways by Bloomberg AI
Joshua Wong became a global celebrity as a teenage protest leader in Hong Kong, appearing on the cover of Time magazine, serving as the subject of an award-winning documentary distributed by Netflix and being nominated multiple times for the Nobel Peace Prize. He will spend his 30th birthday in prison next month and faces many more years of incarceration after pleading guilty to a foreign collusion charge in a national security case on Sept. 2. These are lonely days for the city’s jailed activists. The democratic world has a duty not to forget them.
Wong was imprisoned for his role in the city’s vast 2019 pro-democracy demonstrations, as well as his participation the following year in an unofficial primary election that authorities deemed subversive. The protests, which sometimes turned violent, prompted China to impose a national security law on Hong Kong that has been used to criminalize peaceful political dissent. Last week, three organizers of an annual vigil marking the 1989 Tiananmen massacre were sentenced to terms of between five and seven years for inciting subversion. Wong, who has been behind bars for six years, is the only person to be prosecuted twice under the law. A four-year delay in bringing the second case looked calculated to prolong his sentence and keep him in prison beyond his expected 2027 release date.
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