Yang Chau-ki seems to have fibbed in court when defending her display of “seditious” materials.
The items she set up near her apartment during several months of 2024 were things like “a colonial-era Hong Kong flag, a sign bearing the 2019 protest slogan ‘Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times,’ and another sign that read: ‘Expel the Communist Party, expel mainland garbage security guards’ ” (Hong Kong Free Press, October 16, 2026).
The West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts convicted Yang Chau-ki of sedition on Friday morning. Yang told the court one day earlier that she did not intend to incite others, and she simply wanted to express her dissatisfaction over a security guard working in her building….
Principal Magistrate Don So said on Friday that he accepted Yang’s discontent toward the security guard. But he added that the meaning of the words she displayed went beyond that, effectively encouraging others to persist with their demands until the current system is overthrown, Ming Pao [a Chinese-language website] reported.
So [the magistrate] therefore found the defendant guilty, but he accepted the psychiatric report’s recommendation to hand down a hospital order.
The Free Press has changed its transliteration of Yang’s name since early September, when we offered the unexpert opinion that “Yang Chau-kei Doesn’t Sound Crazy.” Back then Yang told the court again and again “I did not break the law, they framed me,” a refrain that she repeated even when asked whether she needed a lawyer. She also said that the national security laws “are problematic, and they are using these illegal means to falsely accuse me.”
Now she’s getting three months in a psychiatric hospital for the crime of making known her opinions when she could have gotten seven years in prison. This maximum sentence is thanks to the “homegrown national security law” that the Hong Kong government, supposedly quite independently of Beijing, imposed in 2024 as a follow-up to Beijing’s 2020 National Security Law. Before the 2024 enhancements, the maximum penalty for “sedition” had been two years in prison.
It should be unnecessary to say that Yang Chau-ki did not hatch any seditious plots.
HKFP reports that “Yang suffers from schizophrenia and delusional disorder, according to a court-ordered psychiatric report, but she said she understood the charge and legal procedure and was deemed fit to enter a plea.”
Yang was crazy to flout the Chinese Communist Party by flaunting her opinions…or was she?
