The ten year sentence imposed on Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong today illustrates both the brutality and the insecurity of the regime in Beijing.
The fact that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is so scared of one 30 year-old peaceful dissident that it feels the need to keep him locked up for this long, even though he has already spent more than six years in jail, shows that it is as neurotic and paranoid as it is repressive and inhumane.
Joshua Wong deserves to be honoured and applauded, not jailed
In 2017, Joshua Wong was the subject of an award-winning Netflix documentary, Joshua: Teenager vs Superpower. The superpower may have prevailed for now, but at the cost of admitting its fear of one kid’s extraordinary moral courage. Beijing has stolen his youth. It must not be allowed to steal his future.
Joshua Wong first began his activism as a teenager at the age of 14, when he founded a movement against the introduction of pro-Beijing propaganda in Hong Kong’s schools, known as Scholarism.
He went on to become one of the most internationally-recognised leaders of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy, playing a prominent role in the Umbrella Movement protests in 2014 and the 2019 demonstrations. In 2016, he founded the pro-democracy political party known as Demosistō.
Much of Joshua’s youth has been spent in prison.
I first came to know him after the Umbrella Movement in 2014, and when he was jailed, along with Nathan Law and Alex Chow, becoming Hong Kong’s first political prisoners in 2017, I launched a campaign for their release which led to the formation of an organisation I lead called Hong Kong Watch.
But since 2020 he has been in prison on multiple charges. Wong has spent over 2,100 days behind bars and marked his 30th birthday in his jail cell last month. He is already serving a prison sentence of four years and eight months for “conspiracy to commit subversion” and was originally due for release in January 2027, but was charged for a second time in June 2025 under the National Security Law with the crime of “conspiring to collude with foreign forces”. He pleaded guilty to this charge in September.
What is he really guilty of? Exercising his basic rights to freedom of expression and association, and talking to foreign politicians and international media. It’s that simple.
Before his arrest and imprisonment, Joshua travelled internationally and met political leaders in Washington, DC, London, and other capitals, including the current United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he served in the Senate, and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. I hosted him on several occasions in Parliament in London, taking him to meet the last Governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, the late Paddy Ashdown, and other Parliamentarians in both Houses. He appeared on the front cover of TIME magazine, and spoke to international media. Those actions – entirely normal in any free society – amount to collusion with foreign forces.
Joshua’s sentencing is the latest in a series of violations by China of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international treaty registered at the United Nations and signed in 1984 to pave the way for the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom and China in 1997.
In that treaty, China promised to uphold basic human rights, the rule of law and autonomy in Hong Kong at least until 2047. Yet in recent years, and particularly since the introduction of the National Security Law in 2020, China has ripped up and trampled all over the Joint Declaration as it has dismantled Hong Kong’s basic human rights, imprisoning hundreds of peaceful political activists, including media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, sentenced to 20 years in prison earlier this year, barrister Chow Hang-tung, trade unionist Lee Cheuk-yan, solicitor Albert Ho, and other elected legislators, lawyers, journalists, students, academics, civil society representatives and human rights defenders.
China has also in effect abandoned Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, which offers guarantees of freedom of speech, assembly, association and other fundamental liberties, and holds out the prospect of “universal suffrage” in elections for its legislature and Chief Executive. Those promises are long gone, as the legislature is packed with pro-Beijing puppets and the Chief Executive is handpicked and controlled by Beijing. But Joshua Wong’s “crime” was to appeal for Beijing to honour its constitutional and treaty-bound commitments – and for that he has been jailed.
The lesson to be learned is that the regime in Beijing cannot be trusted. No treaty it signs is worth the paper they are written on. The CCP is a regime that locks up its opponents at home, threatens its critics abroad, and lives on lies and repression.
So the international community, and Britain in particular, must lead a robust response.
Joshua was born just a year before the handover of Hong Kong to China and so, even if he is not legally a British national, morally we have a duty of care toward him. The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary must make Joshua’s release, alongside that of British citizen Jimmy Lai, and other key prisoners a priority. They should take note of the Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch’s pledge that, if she were prime minister, she would not go to Beijing unless and until such dissidents were released. She is right. We must stop kowtowing to Beijing and start using leverage to secure the release of those unjustly jailed.
But the United States has a duty too, especially as Joshua met such senior figures as Rubio and Pelosi. Both Rubio – as Secretary of State – and the Democrats, given their victory in the mid-term elections – must press Beijing to free Joshua and other Hong Kong prisoners, and push President Trump to make this a priority in his final two years in office.
Joshua deserves to be honoured and applauded, not jailed. He has already sacrificed his youth for the cause of freedom. Now it is time to give him freedom, and not let him languish in jail for life.
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