The Hong Kong government finally issued its verdict to the 47 members of the pro-democracy camp who have been detained for over three years—a long-awaited trial punctuated by multiple delays. The 47 were arrested in 2021 for organizing an unofficial primary to field pro-democracy candidates, so that the movement could consolidate candidates to maximize their chances of victory in the city’s Legislative Council elections in 2020. The strategy was intended as a legal way to continue Hong Kong’s democratic struggle, in light of the increasing repression of political dissent with the passage of the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020, which concluded a fiery, nearly-year-long mass movement between 2019 and 2020.
Benny Tai, a key pro-democracy figure who also organized open mass assemblies that led to the Umbrella Movement in 2013, received the highest sentence—10 years, shortened from 15, as Tai pleaded guilty. Those charged come from a variety of ideological backgrounds, reflecting the political pluralism of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Some are the most visible figures of the city’s labor movements and the progressive left. “Long Hair,” Leung Kwok-hung, the city’s most prominent left-wing and Marxist activist, received one of the highest sentences among those not considered as one of the primary’s official organizers. Leung has been a longtime participant in militant struggles since the 1970s, organizing actions against the British colonial regime as a member of the Revolutionary Marxist League and later, April Fifth Action; and as a convenor of the League of Social Democrats (LSD), demonstrating against multiple US-backed imperialist wars from Iraq to Gaza, neoliberal globalization, and other local progressive causes. Carol Ng and Winnie Yu, union leaders who mobilized the workers during the anti-extradition bill movement, received sentences of four years and five months and six years and nine months respectively. Another former LSD leader, Jimmy Sham, a key LGBTQ+ rights activist who has continued his advocacy in prison—arguing for the courts to recognize overseas same-sex marriages last year—was sentenced to four years and three months.
Apparently, simply naming social antagonisms between classes in one of the world’s most hyper-capitalist and unequal cities counts as ‘sedition.’
A multitude of civil society and legal organizations have condemned the trials as fraudulent, charging that the national security laws contain so much ambiguity that they essentially give the state free rein to prosecute any opposition. The recent (revival of and) passage of Article 23 further reinforces these legal ambiguities to enable this unprecedented state of repression. For one, the article strengthens the state’s prosecution of “seditious” acts, identified as “the intent to endanger national security.” Even before the trial of the 47, the state has shown great willingness to capitalize on the vagueness of such wording to indict people for what it considers national security crimes. In 2022, two people were arrested for committing “acts with seditious intention”—posting messages on social media that “promote feelings of ill-will and enmity between different classes of the population of Hong Kong.” Apparently, simply naming social antagonisms between classes in one of the world’s most hyper-capitalist and unequal cities, in other words, counts as “sedition.” In the same year, pro-democracy lawyer Chow Hang-tung was accused of conspiring with “foreign agents,” but state prosecutors withheld and redacted their proof in the name of safeguarding national security.
What these examples and this trial’s verdict show is that the Hong Kong government has abandoned any remaining semblance of democratic norms—even as the rule of law has never really existed in the first place. Even before the passage of the NSL, unelected professional business sectors composed nearly half of the city’s legislature (a colonial-era system pro-Beijing forces lobbied to retain in the final years of British rule), while the government in Beijing reserves the final right to interpret any laws or legal decisions in Hong Kong. Many of the laws used against opposition figures and protestors are also ones directly inherited from the colonial era: for example, prosecutor Laura Ng directly cited an 1868 British law used to quell Irish rebellions to justify her verdict of the pro-democracy media outlet Stand News as “seditious” in 2022. In the first comprehensive study of the NSL, legal scholar Han Zhu describes these laws as “an unprecedented experiment,” and “a bizarre mixture of elements from socialist civil law, Hong Kong common law, and British colonial law.” The NSL’s improvisatory nature demonstrates that legality only serves now as a poorly assembled set of fictions that barely mask the state’s naked rule by totalitarian force.
Beijing cannot tolerate those who expose the fraudulence and hypocrisy of its sham rule of law because it threatens to energize mass democratic activity that exceeds the boundaries of legality.
That Tai—perhaps among the most politically moderate of the 47 arrested—received the heaviest sentence suggests specifically that Beijing cannot tolerate those who expose the fraudulence and hypocrisy of its sham rule of law because it threatens to energize mass democratic activity that exceeds the boundaries of legality. Tai’s historical contributions to Hong Kong’s democratic movement are complex. A committed liberal and consistent advocate of adhering to the rule of law and nonviolence, Tai is at once among the most militant figures in the old-guard pro-democracy movement and among the most conservative ones in the renewed pro-democracy movement, shaped by a more militant ideology of localism in the wake of the Umbrella Movement. Along with Chu Yiu-ming and Chan Kin-man, Tai played a key role in unleashing the Occupy Central movement in 2013—which their old-guard allies were hesitant to endorse.
But his original vision of the action was much tamer than what it eventually became. He envisioned a performative, low-risk action, centering around “those above the age of 40” to “fight for a more just system for the youth.” When the planned action threatened to erupt into a mass movement far beyond their vision on July 2, 2014, with the Hong Kong Federation of Students announcing a street occupation after a mass online vote, Tai, Chu, and Chan had announced a day prior that they would not personally participate nor call on others to do so, but still respect the students’ decisions. In 2017, Tai even advocated for supporting the candidacy of select members of the pro-establishment camp who simply promised to quicken Hong Kong’s democratic development. Nonetheless, regardless of Tai’s own views, as Hong Kong socialist Au Loong-yu wrote in a postmortem of the Umbrella Movement in 2015, he has “become the passer of the baton between two generations of democratic movements.”
And so, while localism emerged as a militant reaction against the moderate politics Tai represents, ironically, its seeds were formed in the very movement Tai helped to start. But this paradox precisely captures what Beijing fears most. Tai revealed that the state could not even consent to the most basic reforms within the limits of the illusory rule of law that it had erected, and that the exposure of this hypocrisy has great potential to spark everyday people across generations and different walks of life to participate in mass politics. However constrained Tai’s political horizon is, some of his organizing solutions inadvertently opened avenues for the everyday masses to participate in collective self-activity and democratic deliberation. Acknowledging this allows us to understand why the state gave the heaviest penalty to the proponent of such a toothless and moderate tactic. The state was not really threatened by what such candidates may do in the legislature if they win—but by the potential resurgence of a militant, possibly revolutionary, mass movement that organizes beyond the chambers of LegCo, which it had only just contained by force. In 2020, the primary turned out 600,000 voters, making it the most-participated one in the whole history of Hong Kong. This renewal of energy after months of uncertainty and fear wrought by growing repression and the early stages of the pandemic threatened to revive the mass movement anew.
Tai and others’ political repression shows that mass movements that expose and challenge the hypocrisies of sham legality, rather than confinement within participation in legalistic or electoral politics, threaten the ruling power. In this vein, the most effective avenue for international solidarity is not appealing to the sham “democratic” institutions of the West, which have been eager to co-opt critiques of China for their own imperialist designs. And so, in this particular conjuncture, we must contextualize our critique of China’s further crackdown on Hong Kong activists in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. Not merely gestural, it is a forceful recognition of the United States’ shameless hypocrisy that sees State Department officials condemning the kangaroo courts of Hong Kong while supplying an endless stream of arms and defensive technologies and vociferously shielding Israel from any legal consequence for its war crimes.
Given the extremity of slaughter and the US and Israel’s collaborative flouting of international law, there is no longer room for Hong Kong activists to feign innocence at the US’ machinations on the global stage.
Given the extremity of slaughter and the US and Israel’s collaborative flouting of international law—a tool that many activists claim the US rightfully wields against a “lawless” China—there is no longer room for Hong Kong activists to feign innocence at the US’ machinations on the global stage. Attempts to play realpolitik and leverage Sinophobia, encouraged by the US and other Western regimes, in the struggle against China’s regional hegemony in the midst of an ongoing genocide discredits Hongkongers’ claims to stand on the side of an abstract “democratic spirit.” And worse, they place our city amongst the sincere advocates and cynical whitewashers of mass slaughter. The US empire’s record of mass destruction and violation of democratic norms is legion: from its Cold War-era sabotage of democratic processes in Latin America and flagrant slaughter of millions in Southeast Asia to the ongoing colonization of the Pacific. In light of this past and present reality of US imperialism, it is clearer now more than ever that the US cannot be the partner that some Hongkongers hope for in our struggle for democratic self-determination.
Hong Kong’s democratic left and labor movements have long been the staunchest fighters against the collusion between the Chinese government’s authoritarian capitalist rule and Western imperialism. For one, some have chosen to present Long Hair as solely an anti-China, pro-democracy activist, but that would be to disrespect his and others’ decades-long socialist critique of all imperialisms, including both the US and China. If Hongkongers are to honor his activism in the wake of his sentencing, we must internalize his multi-angulated analysis of global empire, up to and including his critique of Israel and defense of Palestinian’s right to life, the right to return to their ancestral lands, and the struggle for decolonization.
The most effective path for international solidarity with the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong today is solidarity with the mass anti-imperialist movements worldwide challenging Western institutions’ complicity in abetting genocide and authoritarianism. Chinese capital participates in the imperialist division of the world—sometimes in tension with the US, and at other times, in collusion with it. Its economic rise is fueled by its support and investment in exploitative and repressive regimes around the world, including but not limited to Myanmar, Israel, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kenya. To genuinely build an effective democratic opposition against the authoritarian Chinese state requires us to strengthen our ties with movements from below worldwide fighting these interconnected enemies, not taking sides in an inter-imperialist conflict.
This persecution of Hong Kong’s activists marks a dark day for the city’s long and tortuous path to democracy. Properly acknowledging the weight of this historic defeat demands a clear recognition of the indisputable historic contributions and sacrifices of those imprisoned. It also demands an honest assessment of the pro-democracy movement’s historic successes and limitations. Only after this can we carve out new paths for international solidarity beyond the parameters of past movements in order to rebuild our struggle for the better.
