Police arrive at the West Kowloon Magistrates' court in Hong Kong on Thursday for the start of the trial of the now-disbanded Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China.PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images
The organizers of an annual candlelit vigil in Hong Kong commemorating the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre went on trial Thursday, in the latest high profile national security trial targeting members of the Chinese territory’s pro-democracy movement.
The Tiananmen vigil, held every year from 1990 to 2019, was a symbol of Hong Kong’s relative freedoms and civil liberties compared to the Chinese mainland. It was organized by the Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, itself emblematic of a widespread belief in the early decades of Hong Kong’s handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997 that the former colony would influence autocratic China, rather than the other way around.
Those hopes have been dashed in recent years, as Beijing first set limits on how much democracy it would tolerate in Hong Kong, and then cracked down heavily after mass protests in 2014 and 2019, which brought millions to the streets demanding greater freedoms.
The 2019 Tiananmen vigil was among the largest in history, and the last held with the authorities’ reluctant blessing: The following year’s memorial was banned on COVID-19 grounds, while subsequent events were unable to go ahead due to a draconian national security law introduced in mid-2020.
Last year, June 4 passed in Hong Kong much as it does in mainland China, with a heavy police presence and scant public commemoration.
The Alliance disbanded in September, 2021, in the wake of intense pressure from the authorities, who that same month detained organizers Lee Cheuk-yan, Albert Ho and Chow Hang-tung. The three have since spent more than 1,300 days in custody, waiting for the long-delayed start of their trial on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.”
Mr. Ho, a former legislator and one-time candidate to be Hong Kong chief executive, entered a guilty plea Thursday. Mr. Lee and Ms. Chow, a former labour leader and barrister respectively, both pleaded not guilty.
Lead prosecutor Lai Ka-yee said all three had conspired to achieve the “illegal goal” of ending one-party rule in China, a long-stated aim of the pro-democracy Alliance.
“There is no lawful way to terminate the leadership of the Communist Party,” Mr. Lai said.
Despite repeated promises at the time the national security law was imposed on Hong Kong that it would not be retroactive, Mr. Lai pointed to behaviour by the defendants prior to 2020, including organizing the annual Tiananmen vigil and criticizing Communist rule in Beijing, both completely legal for decades, as proof of how the Alliance had “endangered national security” and incited others to “subvert state power.”
In a statement, Amnesty International deputy regional director Sarah Brooks said Thursday’s case “is not about national security – it is about rewriting history and punishing those who refuse to forget the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown.”
The prosecution of Mr. Lee, Mr. Ho and Ms. Chow “is a clear illustration of how the Hong Kong government uses vague and overly broad national security laws as tools of repression,” she said.
Ms. Brooks described the defendants as “prisoners of conscience,” adding that the Hong Kong courts “face a critical test: whether they will uphold human rights, or continue to lend judicial legitimacy to a sweeping crackdown on dissent.”
Thursday’s trial, expected to last at least 75 days, takes place after the high-profile prosecution of Hong Kong newspaper publisher and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai, and even shares a judge with that case: Alex Lee, one of a handful of justices designated by Hong Kong’s leader John Lee to hear national security cases.
Jimmy Lai’s lawyers argue for leniency as potential life sentence looms
Mr. Lai, 78, was found guilty of colluding with foreign forces and sedition in December last year, and is currently awaiting sentencing. He faces up to life in prison, with a minimum sentence of 10 years that his family have said could nevertheless see him die behind bars, given his health and advanced age.
That case attracted intense criticism and demands for Mr. Lai’s release, including from Canada, Britain and the United States. The prosecution of the Tiananmen vigil organizers is likely to spark a similar wave of opprobrium and, in highlighting Hong Kong’s shrinking freedoms in recent years, further damage the territory’s attempt to rebuild its international image in the wake of the post-2019 crackdown.
Writing in The Globe and Mail this week, Rowena He, a Canadian-Chinese scholar of the Tiananmen movement who was herself forced to leave Hong Kong in 2023, said the Alliance, far from being seditious, was part of a long legacy of patriotic protest in China.
“In 1989, students in Tiananmen Square called their movement patriotic, too,” Prof. He said. “Following the Chinese tradition of Confucian dissent, they were not aiming for regime change; they considered it their responsibility as loyal citizens to build a better China.”
The vigils once held in Victoria Park, she added, remain “part of the Hong Kong spirit, a spirit of humanity that cannot be crushed by guns and tanks and jails.”
Hong Kong officials have pushed back hard against any criticism of national security cases from overseas and domestically. In a speech Monday, justice secretary Paul Lam warned freedom of expression and freedom of the press “do not include making unfounded accusations against the integrity of our judiciary.”
He added, “Hong Kong’s success as an international centre in finance, trading and other areas as well as people’s general sense of security depend very much on their perception of, and trust and confidence in, our judiciary.”