Wong undefeated despite ruling

Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong (黃之鋒) writes letters from Stanley Prison like a man who knows he is being read twice, once by the friends he addresses and once by the censors who stamp them. He swaps books with triad bosses. He teaches English to a Russian inmate who asks what “totalitarian” means, and Wong answers with a single word: Putin. He is studying company law by correspondence. He has been in custody since November 2020, and on Thursday a Hong Kong court added a 10-year sentence for foreign collusion, his second conviction under the National Security Law Beijing imposed on the territory.

Consider the arithmetic of this. Wong was due for release in January, but prosecutors waited nearly five years after the alleged offense, then moved days before the gate would have opened. The sentences will run concurrently, so the practical effect is to keep one 30-year-old man behind walls a while longer. A state confident in its own legitimacy does not need to engineer timing like that. It does so when it fears what a free Wong might say, and fears more that the answer would be believed.

This is the pattern across every regime that mistakes obedience for strength. Beijing has spent six years dismantling Hong Kong’s opposition: more than 400 arrests under national security legislation by the government’s own count, newsrooms shuttered, a political class pushed into exile. The official story is stability, but stability that requires a prison sentence for a bookish activist with a guitar and a pull-up routine is less stability than it is a held breath.

Strength, whatever Beijing’s propagandists insist, comes from the opposite direction. Societies grow resilient by letting arguments collide, by letting errors be named before they become catastrophes. Taiwan, where I have lived for 20 years, offers the evidence in daily life: a raucous legislature, a press that savages its own presidents, an electorate that has changed governments peacefully again and again. That noise is the sound of a system that corrects itself. Hong Kong’s courts do the reverse, converting criticism into crime and calling the silence order.

Critical thinking is the real strategic asset. Wong reads Alexei Navalny’s memoir, Nelson Mandela’s biography, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, even Hillbilly Elegy on the day of the US elections. He asks friends to put questions to chatbots on his behalf. A mind that hungry cannot be sentenced out of existence. His worry, he writes, is that the world will forget the countless unknown people who paid a price for their beliefs. That is not the language of a defeated man. It is the language of someone still thinking about others from a cell.

Beijing’s sentence also fails by its own logic. Every year of Wong’s confinement enlarges the legend it hopes to erase. Mandela spent 27 years in custody and emerged to govern the nation that jailed him. Navalny’s prison letters outlived the regime’s patience with him, and his memoir now sits in Wong’s hands in Stanley. Regimes that fear voices tend to manufacture the very symbols they dread.

The party that rules from Beijing wants the world to see a confident power. What the world sees instead is a state so brittle that it must lock up an intellect, then time the paperwork. Taiwan, watching closely from the other side of the Strait, should draw the obvious lesson. Strength is not the capacity to silence. It is the capacity to be questioned and survive. By that measure, the prisoner is the stronger party, and everyone involved knows it.

Clive Hazell is a Kaohsiung-based writer and educator. A 30-year-resident of Taiwan and Japan, he writes about geopolitics, culture and East Asia.