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A Hong Kong court is set to deliver a long-awaited verdict this week in the territory’s biggest national security trial to date, as Beijing wields sweeping national security powers to remove 47 of the city’s most prominent political opposition figures from public life.
More than 600,000 Hongkongers cast their votes in a primary election in 2020 for the city’s opposition, one of the biggest informal exercises of democracy in the territory and less than two weeks after Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law.
Authorities in 2021 arrested 47 alleged organisers and participants in the poll, in the single largest police raid under the security law. For many, the move demonstrated the erosion of civil liberties in Hong Kong in the wake of pro-democracy protests. Those arrested include opposition politicians, union activists, student leaders, academics and journalists.
While 31 have pleaded guilty, the court will this week rule on the 16 who have pleaded not guilty. If convicted, they could face life imprisonment.
“The major message [from the trial] will be to Hong Kong society: politicians and democrats, you better behave. Either you toe the line, you support the Communist party or you are excluded from political life,” said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a senior research fellow at the Paris-based Asia Centre.
In court hearings, the prosecution described the vote as an attempt to “paralyse” Hong Kong’s government by winning majority control of the legislature and blocking the approval of government budgets or public spending. John Lee, then the security chief and now the city’s leader, at the time branded the plan to “subvert” authorities as “vicious”.
The case comes amid a broader crackdown in the territory. Authorities have already overhauled the city’s education system, introducing a “patriotic” syllabus, while opposition figures have in effect been barred from politics under Beijing’s condition of “patriots ruling Hong Kong”. Large-scale protests, once a regular occurrence, have vanished.
“Pro-democratic political activity in Hong Kong is over and likely will remain off-limits for years to come,” said Thomas Kellogg, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Asian Law. “Even mainstream opposition politics would no longer be tolerated.”
Hong Kong in March enacted its own local security legislation, raising penalties for crimes including sedition. On Tuesday, national security officials made the first arrests under the new law, with six people including activist Chow Hang-tung targeted over social media posts relating to the crushing of pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
YouTube has removed dozens of links to a popular protest anthem deemed seditious under a separate court ruling, illustrating the challenges for US tech giants to operate in the once-freewheeling city. Beijing critic and one-time media mogul Jimmy Lai is also on trial and could face life in prison if found guilty of collusion with foreign forces and conspiring to publish seditious material.
Hong Kong has struggled to woo back foreign investors alarmed by the crackdown and tough restrictions during the pandemic. Some pro-Beijing politicians hope that once the verdicts and sentencing have been delivered on Lai and the “Hong Kong 47”, the city’s focus will return to business. “The focus is on economic development now,” said Lau Siu-kai, a consultant for the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies and a Beijing adviser.
Beijing wants to “convince everyone to go back to business as usual”, added Cabestan, “because they want to reassure the business community to attract investment”.
Some believe the city’s reputation will continue to be overshadowed by its national security push. “The fact that those laws . . . create legal risk, combined with ongoing NSL trials, means that it will be difficult for the Hong Kong government to pivot away from its national security efforts any time soon,” said Kellogg.
Those who have pleaded guilty include student activist Joshua Wong, legal scholar Benny Tai, former Democratic party leader Wu Chi-wai and former AFP journalist and lawmaker Claudia Mo.
The guilty plea is a “rational step”, said Kellogg, given that under Hong Kong common law this makes them eligible for a possible one-third sentence reduction.
Most of the defendants have spent more than three years in detention after being denied bail. “No doubt, for many, family and personal life concerns are driving their considerations [in entering a guilty plea],” he said. “Some have already seen family members fall ill or even pass away during their time [in] detention.” Wu’s parents, he noted, have died since he was jailed.
Leung Kwok-hung, a 68-year-old former pro-democracy lawmaker in Hong Kong nicknamed “Long Hair”, is one of those who maintains his innocence. “I have committed no crime,” Leung told the court when the trial opened in February last year.
Leung, who has struggled to adapt to prison life, reads as much as he can, said his wife Chan Po-ying, also a political activist and chair of the League of Social Democrats, one of Hong Kong’s few remaining opposition groups.
She sends him books, and he has recently been reading Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir, which portrays life in Germany before the second world war. Whatever the verdict, “he still believes that there is no crime that he should answer to”, Chan told the Financial Times.
