Joshua Wong, the face of the Hong Kong protests, has been sentenced to ten years

The photo of a very young Joshua Wong, wearing his unmistakable black glasses, at a protest in Hong Kong in 2012 had become the symbol of the Umbrella Movement; Time magazine dedicated a cover to him: the face of the protest. Yesterday, that same photo came to symbolize a draconian sentence for a young man who has just turned thirty and who, by the time he is released from prison, will have spent half his life behind bars.

In that photo, Wong was 16 years old; since then, he has become the leader of massive protests which, in recent years, have changed the fate and lives of those who took part, as well as that of a city which has come to resemble the Chinese Communist Party. It is impossible to keep count of the number of times Wong has been arrested since he began demonstrating; he has been in prison since November 2020, charged with “conspiracy to subvert state power”, incitement to hold unauthorised assemblies, participation in an unauthorised vigil for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and “collusion with foreign forces”.

He was already serving a sentence of four years and eight months; he had been forced to plead guilty and was due to be released in January. Yesterday he was sentenced to a further ten years’ imprisonment for collusion with foreign forces, becoming the only pro-democracy activist to have been tried twice under the National Security Law: he will now serve both sentences, under the same freedom-suppressing law, concurrently. When he pleaded guilty last September, the Chinese government had attempted to change the narrative surrounding Wong.

In his letters from prison, the activist’s stance – contrary to what Beijing would have us believe – has never changed: his sole concern, he says, is that people will forget about Hong Kong, and all the ordinary, unknown people ‘who have paid a price for their convictions’. Just the day before, by way of a reminder, he had written: “I have never had much faith in Hong Kong’s politics, but I have complete faith in the people of Hong Kong”.