Propaganda outlet China Daily asserts that the Hong Kong government’s treatment of Joshua Wong is about “establishing order,” a claim that any killer can make about the virtue of binding and gagging unruly victims. We hear that a great benefit of Wong’s case is that it “deters future offenses.” And who could be opposed to whatever a totalitarian state may do to “deter future offenses”?
The author, Fu Kin-chi, who may be a blow-up doll or who may as stated be a law professor for all the good it does him, ends his string of evasions by praising the repressive 2020 National Security Law. Fu says that this travesty, one of the last major stages in the wiping out of Hong Kong’s alternative system, consolidated a “rule-of-law bulwark” that ensures “the smooth and enduring implementation of the ‘one country, two systems’ policy.” One must be an accomplished and profound legal thinker to so unerringly repeat the CCP talking points.
“Collusion”
The New York Times reports that “Joshua Wong, Jailed Hong Kong Activist, Pleads Guilty to Foreign Collusion.” His “efforts to lobby Western politicians to pressure Hong Kong are at the center of his latest national security case.” Wong has indeed been “guilty” of seeking help for a besieged populace (September 2, 2026).
[The case] shows how China treats international outreach as a national security crime.
The maximum penalty for colluding with foreign forces is life in prison.
Mr. Wong was accused of conspiring with other campaigners to lobby lawmakers, particularly those in the United States like Nancy Pelosi and Marco Rubio, to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and China. The campaigners sought to pressure officials in Beijing and Hong Kong for greater democratic rights in the semiautonomous territory.
Mr. Wong, who turns 30 next month, was one of the youngest activists in a democracy movement that was quashed in 2020 after Beijing introduced a sweeping national security law that effectively outlawed political dissent in Hong Kong….
He is already serving an almost five-year prison term for his role in an unofficial primary election in 2020 organized by the city’s pro-democracy camp that the authorities deemed subversive. That case, the city’s largest national security trial, led to the conviction of Mr. Wong and more than 40 other former politicians and activists….
Mr. Wong’s repeated prosecutions reflect the drastic political changes that have taken place in Hong Kong, a former British colony, since it was returned to China in 1997. At the time, Beijing agreed to preserve Western-style civil liberties that are not available in mainland China, such as freedom of speech, for 50 years.
Today, the city’s legislature is devoid of any significant opposition and independent media and members of civil society have largely been muzzled. Bookstores accused of carrying subversive books have been closed….
Mr. Wong rose to prominence in 2012, when at he age of 14 he led a student movement to oppose the introduction of a Chinese national education curriculum in Hong Kong.
Reporter David Pierson deserves credit for reporting as fact that the 2020 law “effectively outlawed political dissent in Hong Kong” instead of following the procedure of reporters or editors willing to commit themselves only to such facts as that “activists say” or “governments say” that dissent has been crushed in Hong Kong.
In a “collusion” case, a guilty plea acceptable to the Chinese Communist Party must convey something more than “Yes, I did seek help in resisting tyranny.” It must imply acceptance of the assumption that opposing tyranny, at least the CCP’s tyranny, is in itself wrong.
So Joshua Wong had no motive to plead guilty except the justified one of trying to reduce his prison time.
He has not yet been sentenced.
