Joshua Wong Will Spend His Prime Behind Beijing’s Bars: A Parent’s Reflection

Commentary

On Nov. 5, Joshua Wong was sentenced to 10 more years in prison in Hong Kong, after pleading guilty to conspiracy to collude with foreign forces under the National Security Law. It was Joshua’s second conviction under that law. He had already spent almost six years behind bars, and had been due to be freed in January. He is now not due for release until late 2036.

I did not read this as news about a stranger. I read it as news about a boy I first noticed in 2012, when he was 16 and arguing against national education in Hong Kong—a boy about my son’s age.

I first became aware of Joshua during the campaign against the proposed national education curriculum, when a teenager suddenly emerged at the centre of a debate that was dominating my social media feeds and many conversations among journalists I knew. What caught my attention was that he was about the same age as my son.

That is where this article begins, and it is not where most articles about Joshua Wong begin. This is not another human rights article. It is a parent writing about another parent’s child, and about a generation.

When I first saw Joshua in 2012, my reaction was not political. It was parental. I wondered about his parents. What kind of family raises a child who is willing to stand in front of cameras and argue with authority before he is old enough to vote? His parents are Christians who encouraged civic awareness from a young age. Most parents teach their children the same things: tell the truth, stand up for others, care about the society you live in, take part in public life. Joshua took those lessons seriously. From a parent’s point of view, there is something deeply unsettling about that outcome. The very qualities parents try to cultivate in a child—honesty, courage, a sense of responsibility for others—became the basis for a young adulthood spent largely behind bars.

Joshua Wong was born in 1996, one year before the handover of Hong Kong to China. He belonged to the first generation to grow up entirely under the framework established by the Sino-British Joint Declaration. People of my generation remember being assured, repeatedly, that Hong Kong’s way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years.

We accepted those assurances, not simply because Beijing made them, but because they were embodied in an international agreement negotiated and signed by Britain, registered with the United Nations in 1985, and recognized around the world. At the signing ceremony, Margaret Thatcher called the declaration “a landmark” and said it would provide “a firm basis for confidence in Hong Kong up to 1997 and beyond.” Britain said it would seek “the widest possible acceptance of the Agreement in the rest of the world,” and that it had already won “high praise from many leading nations in the world.”

Joshua’s generation did not merely hear those promises. They grew up within them. I said it more plainly on live television in June 2019, in the middle of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement: “We thought we had 50 years.” The question raised by Joshua’s imprisonment is whether the Hong Kong his generation inherited resembles the Hong Kong that was promised.

I watched this unfold in real time. On May 5, 2015, Joshua testified by video link to a Canadian parliamentary committee—the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development—from Hong Kong, between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. his time. He was 18. I was not involved in that appearance; I only got involved with a Toronto non-profit organisation at the end of 2015. But I was there for what came next. He came to Canada in person more than once. Many of the meetings during those visits were private and never publicly reported.

I helped arrange a dinner attended by Joshua and two other delegates, and I put him in touch with a producer who wanted to interview him. All of this was open and public. The events were advertised, the meetings were reported, and elected officials in Canada, the United States, and Britain treated him as a legitimate public figure. What he did was extraordinary. Not everyone would do what he did—if everyone had, Hong Kong’s history would be very different. But it was also entirely legal. He was exercising basic human rights, like any citizen: travelling abroad and meeting with whoever he wanted.

The same open, public activities are now cited as the basis for a charge of colluding with foreign forces. From my perspective, there was nothing clandestine about any of it. These were public events, public meetings, and public conversations conducted openly with elected officials and media organizations. I am not making a legal argument here, and I am not debating whether Britain is “directly responsible” for his situation. The question is simpler, and harder.

The people of Hong Kong did not place their trust solely in Beijing’s assurances. We were asked to trust an international arrangement negotiated by Britain, signed by both governments, registered with the United Nations, and welcomed by many governments around the world. The credibility of the Joint Declaration rested not only on the signatures of London and Beijing, but on the broader international acceptance that followed. I made the same argument on CBC Morning Live on June 12, 2019: “All these big countries, they endorse that agreement between China and Britain.” And if they endorsed it on day one, they were supposed to make sure everything was going to be fine, because we trusted in them. If the Hong Kong people were persuaded to trust an internationally endorsed arrangement, what obligations remain when that arrangement appears to have broken down?

There is a wider story here than one young man in a courtroom. Joshua’s case is also about a generation whose political choices reshaped family decisions around the world. Parents who expected their children to build their lives in Hong Kong watched many of them emigrate, separate from their families, and rebuild their lives overseas. The consequences reach beyond the courtroom and beyond Hong Kong. They are now part of the life of the diaspora—in Toronto, in London, in Taipei, and everywhere Hong Kong families have scattered. A whole generation has had to rebuild their lives from scratch abroad, and put the rest of life on hold while they do it. Marriage, having children—all of it pushed until later, because nothing around them feels certain enough to plan on.

And there is the other side of the same story. Joshua was among those who decided to stay behind. He stayed, and kept fighting, hoping that one day all of this would work out. What does that choice mean—to stay when leaving was possible, to keep going when the outcome looks settled against you? That is not a Hong Kong question only. Everywhere people live under a system that is closing in on them, some stay. What staying costs them, and what it means, is a question we rarely ask.

I am not asking you to agree with Joshua Wong’s political views. I am asking you to imagine your own teenager, or your own child at 18, believing what his city once told him—that civic participation, public debate, and the peaceful expression of political views were legitimate parts of citizenship—and then watching the rules change around him. Imagine watching that child spend his 20s in prison for doing, openly, what he had always done openly.

Mimi Lee leads the Toronto-based HongKongers Action Group.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.