Hong Kong’s Tiananmen vigil organizers handed lengthy prison terms

By Chris Lau, CNN

Hong Kong (CNN) — Three key organizers behind what used to be the only large-scale public commemoration for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on Chinese soil will spend years in prison for inciting subversion in Hong Kong after judges handed down their sentence on Friday.

Their imprisonment is the latest chapter in Beijing’s yearslong national security crackdown in Hong Kong underscoring the risks that now exist in the once outspoken city in commemorating the victims of a bloody event Chinese officials have spent decades trying to erase.

The trio were key figures from a group that organized an annual vigil in Hong Kong that marked the moments when the ruling Chinese Communist Party sent in tanks to violently quell peaceful, student-led democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The yearly gathering – where crowds thousands strong would often chant “end one party rule” and other pro-democracy slogans – was a vivid symbol that starkly differentiated the financial hub from the rest of mainland China.

On Friday, West Kowloon Court sentenced Chow Hang-tung, a prominent young human rights lawyer to seven years and three months in prison, and former opposition lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan to seven years in prison. They were found guilty last month.

A third activist, veteran pro-democracy lawmaker Albert Ho – who pleaded guilty for a lighter sentence, an increasingly common strategy for those facing national security charges – received a five years and two months prison term.

The group that used to organize the vigil – the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China – was also fined HK$1.5 million ($191,300).

Before Friday’s sentencing, Chow posted a statement on her Patreon page saying her guilty verdict declared that “pursuing democracy is a crime.”

“If doing so makes me a criminal for life – if the law truly cannot accommodate our beliefs – then I would rather be a criminal than a person who betrays their conscience,” she wrote.

In a summary, the trial judges wrote that the trio’s offenses took place during “a turbulent and unsettled social atmosphere” and that their group spread “subversive” messages through other activities and social media.

“Although the present cases did not involve violence or threat of violence, nor had the defendants put forward any specific means of implementation or timetable to carry out ‘end one-party dictatorship,’ the court found that the offense was still of a serious nature,” the judges wrote.

A city transformed

Hong Kong’s position as a once-outspoken corner of China has been upended in recent years by a national security law Beijing imposed following huge and often violent democracy protests that convulsed the city in 2019.

The erasure of the city’s annual candle-light Tiananmen vigil is one of the most visible examples of the ensuing crackdown, which critics, human rights groups and multiple Western nations – including the United States – say has quashed dissent and ended the city’s unique freedoms.

Beijing and the Hong Kong government say the national security laws were needed to return the city to order and stability.

“The HKSAR Government strongly condemns any biased remarks and smears against the HKSAR’s effort for safeguarding national security,” a government spokesperson said in response to a CNN inquiry when the trio were first convicted, using Hong Kong’s official title, adding rights and freedoms are protected under the national security law.

Chinese troops cracked down on pro-democracy protesters around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. No official death toll has ever been released, but estimates range from several hundred to thousands, with many more injured. The subject remains widely censored inside China.

Following the events of 1989, mourners would converge on the same day every year in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district, to attend a vigil that filled multiple soccer pitches in the neighborhood’s Victoria Park with candlelight, calling for greater democracy for China.

It was a tradition that continued after Hong Kong’s 1997 handover by Britain to China, alongside frequent street protests and a political system that allowed pro-democracy lawmakers to stand.

That tradition came to an end with the imposition of a series of new national security offenses in 2020, with civil groups disbanded, some independent media outlets forced to shut down, and most activists jailed or living in exile.

Prosecutors argued, and the judges agreed, that the campaigns by the vigil organizers – including calls for an end to “one-party dictatorship” – amounted to an incitement to subversion.

Hong Kong leader John Lee – a former security chief – said Friday that authorities would not leave those who endanger national security to go unpunished, calling their crime an “extremely serious” one that “warrants severe punishment.”

“The law never allows anyone to openly harm one’s own country and compatriots by employing confounding tactics under the pretext of human rights, democracy and freedom,” he said.

But human rights groups and multiple foreign nations – including the United States – have condemned their conviction.

“This sentencing is a triple tragedy: for the activists being unjustly punished; the survivors and victims of the Tiananmen crackdown itself; and the generations of Hong Kongers denied the space to discuss one of the most consequential events in modern Chinese history,” Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director Sarah Brooks said.

Retiree Simon Ng, who had attended the Tiananmen vigils for decades, said he came to court on Friday with with a heavy heart, because a peaceful act of speech had now been made illegal.

“Hundreds of thousands of people had attended them in the past. This is an accusation against all of them,” he told CNN.

Zhou Fengsuo, a former student leader at the Tiananmen Square protests who now has US citizenship, told CNN the verdict showed “how profoundly Hong Kong has changed.”

“Authorities can extinguish the candles in Victoria Park, but they cannot extinguish the memory of June 4,” he added.

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