Finalising his book on 9th December 2019, Joshua Wong chose a typically modern metaphor to describe his travails since release from prison in 2017, “If I were to liken our epic struggle for freedom and democracy to the original Star Wars trilogy, then the two years since by imprisonment would be a drawn-out version of the middle instalment, The Empire Strikes Back”. The unanimous passage of Beijing’s National Security Law on 30th June poses questions as to whether a revised edition of this work may instead reference The Revenge of the Sith.

Hong Kong and Joshua Wong

Although (as indicated above) relatively light-hearted at times, Wong’s Unfree Speech constitutes equal parts personal biography and careful analysis of Hong Kong’s current political moment, detailing a city’s fight to maintain and extend its freedom of expression in the face of an increasingly assertive Beijing.

As a high-schooler, Joshua Wong and his friends set up Scholarism in order to oppose National Education in 2012. This move, an attempt by Beijing to reform Hong Kong’s syllabus in line with national norms, was widely expected to be a propaganda exercise.

Scholarism had grown to 10,000 members by May 2012, while concerns around the new education were proven correct by July, when a new teaching manual was issued which among other things claimed that the Chinese Communist Party was an “advanced and selfless regime.” Protests spiralled; students arranged a sit-in and hunger strikes in front of the government headquarters (an area henceforth christened “Civic Square”); and following a march of 120,000 people, the Hong Kong government buckled. 

In 2014, Joshua’s interests moved towards electoral reform, as Scholarism collaborated with the “Occupy Central Trio”, Professor Benny Tai, Professor Chan Kin-Man and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming to first organise an informal referendum on civil nomination (that is, the nomination of candidates by citizens directly without Beijing pre-screening) in which 1/9 of Hong Kong residents participated.

Furthering this, he then was a leader of and arrested during the Occupy Movement, as Civic Square, Mong Kok and Causeway Bay was again occupied from 26 September to 15 December 2014 by a coalition of localist, pro-independence and moderate democratic groups in order to pressure for change. Incidentally, despite Beijing’s insistence that Joshua is a “secessionist”, he strongly differentiates himself from outright pro-independence political groups, demanding a referendum on the continuation of “one country, two systems”, instead, and in 2014 was demanding Beijing live up to its own promise of direct elections for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive by 2020.

Although this occupation did not result in the change the pan-democratic camp desired, Joshua remained undaunted. In 2016, Scholarism became Demosisto, a pro-democracy movement outgrowing its student confines and successfully managing to get Nathan Law, one of its members, elected to the Legislative Council (LegCo). Following this high came a low- during “Oathgate”, Nathan Law and six other democratic lawmakers were disqualified from office for incorrectly repeating their oaths of office.

This unprecedented action (using the oath as a political statement had become something of a pro-democracy tradition) was strongly supported by Beijing’s National People’s Congress (NPC) and 10 months later, upheld in Hong Kong’s own High Court. Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow were then tried and sentenced for unlawful assembly relating to their protests in 2014, and in another unprecedented move had their sentences upgraded from the expected community service to several months in jail. As Joshua put it, they had the dubious honour of becoming Hong Kong’s first political prisoners.

Following his release, Joshua has continued to campaign for democratic rights in the city. He has travelled widely abroad, appearing on the cover of Time in 2015, and stepped up to canvass international support during Hong Kong’s 2019 protests against Carrie Lam’s Extradition Bill, which would allow rendition to PRC courts for certain crimes, courts which are entirely politicised and operate at a rough 99% conviction rate.

For instance, in September 2019 he travelled to Washington D.C. to testify in front of the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), accompanied by Denise Ho and Jeffrey Ngo, the aim of which was to secure the passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019, through which the US certifies and levies sanctions upon figures undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy, and the PROTECT Hong Kong Act, which would ban exporting aggressive crowd control technologies such as tear gas to the city. As of this book’s completion in December 2019, Hong Kong was on an upswing- the Extradition Bill was entirely dropped by Carrie Lam in 2019, and protests continued, demanding five points relating to democratisation and an independent inquiry into police brutality during the protests.

The Rule of Law and the Rule by Law

A recurrent theme throughout Joshua’s work is the continued erosion of Hong Kong’s rule of law. Pride of the city, and indeed one of Britain’s colonial legacies most fondly remembered, the Hong Kong legal system’s separation from the above-referenced politicised PRC judiciary has historically served as a key lynchpin of business confidence in the city, and a liberal space guaranteeing personal freedoms of expression denied in the majority of mainland China.

Joshua Wong’s work is at pains to note the extent that this is weakening. In one of his Gramsci-esque prison letters, which make up one act of the book, he notes that Secretary of Justice Rimsky Yuen personally overruled his recommended sentence to appeal for a prison sentence, resulting in his unprecedented incarceration. Indeed, in a letter of 27thAugust 2017, he strongly urges that Hong Kong activists point out the “elephant in the courtroom”-the judge of his case had been photographed at pro-Beijing events, and judicial decisions around pro-democracy protestors increasingly contain references to curbing an “unhealthy trend” of civil unrest. That is to say, Hong Kong’s rule of law is increasingly becoming rule by law.

Of course, Joshua’s predictions have proven prescient. On 21st April 2020, as the West bore the brunt of its coronavirus peak, fifteen Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmakers, including Martin Lee, the “Father of Democracy” in the territory and a veteran democrat on the scene since 1980s, were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly relating to their participation in 2019. As of writing (30th June) the NPC has also passed a new National Security Law for the territory. Sidestepping the provision Hong Kong enact its own as part of the handover, a project abandoned in 2003 following mass protests, Beijing has imposed its own legislation.

Among other things, this will enable liaison with mainland national security, and the appointment of judges by the chief executive to try national security cases. Punishments involve life imprisonment, while the law itself also overrides any and all conflicting Hong Kong legislation. It is hardly veiled who this is aimed at; Joshua once again has the dubious honour to be named personally by South China Morning Post as its most obvious target. The attenuation of the rule of law, a trend vividly illustrated in Joshua’s book, has thus become apparent, indeed the term ”rule of law” is now itself open to manipulation by Chinese state media sources. As Global Times put it this morning, “The law will not change Hongkongers' way of life, nor will it deprive people of any legal rights there, including freedom of speech. Instigating Hong Kong secession and encouraging foreign forces to "sanction" Hong Kong are equivalent to treason. They have nothing to do with the freedom required by Hong Kong people, and are loopholes in the rule of law.” As of 30th June, Demosisto in response to this has disbanded.

“Where are the Adults?”

A further aspect of Wong’s book is his focus on youth activism. The book overall places itself on a spectrum of global youth resistance to authoritarianism and to capitalist plutocracy. Throughout Unfree Speech, the right to protest, and the struggle for Hong Kong’s freedom of expression is presented not only as one against the PRC but to a great extent against elements of Hong Kong’s own business elite.

To take one example, a letter of his on 26th August 2017 comments on Paul Shieh, a former chair of Hong Kong Bar Association, who in a recent television interview suggested Wong et al deserved to be jailed for their disruption. Wong takes this opportunity to interlink criticisms of Hong Kong’s economic and political system, noting, "both Bottle [Shiu Ka-chun, pro-democracy lawmaker] and Bond asked me what I thought of the controversial comment. I told them that the mindset of Shieh and all the other so-called ‘social elites’ in Hong Kong is what tears our society apart. Call it nepotism or plutocracy, the system always favours the upper rungs and leaves the powerless out in the cold.”

Joshua’s extensive corpus of prison writings within his work further this, touching on topics from police brutality to economic deprivation, or indeed disparities in Hong Kong’s education system which resulted in his use of English words and phrases being criticised by other inmates who simply urged him to “use more Cantonese” which they could understand.

Wong asserts that the “adults”, the salaried professional classes with substantial seats of their own in LegCo and economic interests at heart, have repeatedly let down Hong Kong’s younger generation of youth activists, resulting in the birth by 2019 of “urban guerrilla warfare” articulated through a new self-mobilising and crowdsourcing protest movement. To reference the graffiti taken by many as emblematic of Hong Kong’s 2019 uprising, “It was YOU who taught us that peaceful protest doesn’t work”. One of the concluding aspects of his work is to suggest a 10-point plan for youth activism in support of Hong Kong. As Ai Weiwei, himself an exile activist, puts it in the foreword to the work, Joshua Wong’s philosophy is one of pushing for democratic rights by vividly, and publicly demonstrating their exercise.

“Our struggle has become your struggle, whether you like it or not”

Drawing his work together, Wong draws further afield. China is compared to Turkey and Russia, while the need to challenge an increasingly assertive Xi Jinping, the “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, is suggested not just to be a Hong Konger’s problem but one for every global citizen. Indeed, the back cover of his review carries an endorsement from Greta Thunberg, while the book takes forewords from Christ Patten, Hong Kong’s last British governor, and as mentioned Ai Weiwei.

The “Canary in the Coalmine” factor is vividly illustrated throughout Unfree Speech, indeed its main drawback, that it was published in February 2020, is nonetheless something of a strength- a substantial number of the themes referenced within continuing to play out or be proven correct as the Chinese party-state tightens its grip on the city. Written for the general reader, it tackles points local and international regarding global protest, freedom of speech, and Hong Kong’s particular place in the meta-discourse of human rights.

Ben is an undergraduate reading Ancient and Modern History (AMH) at the University of Oxford, and an incoming MPhil Modern Chinese Studies postgraduate at the University of Oxford. His dissertation, on the Tibetan experience in the early People’s Republic of China, has recently been selected for publication by Oxford University History Society (OUHS).

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