HKers have no crime to repent

On Friday last week, Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤), former leader of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, appeared before a Hong Kong court for what was supposed to be a mitigation hearing.

Chow had already been found guilty, together with the now-disbanded alliance and its former chairman Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人), of inciting subversion of state power. Now came the familiar ritual before sentencing: The convicted tell the court why leniency is warranted.

However, Chow did not believe she had done anything wrong, saying: “We should not spend a single day in prison.”

It would be easy to describe what followed as defiance, but she was refusing something more fundamental: the moral premise upon which leniency would be granted.

The court could find her guilty. It could imprison her, but it could not make her agree that what she had done deserved punishment.

During her oral submission, Chow said she and her fellow defendants believe dictatorship is wrong and democracy is right. Judge Alex Lee Wan-tang (李運騰) said that the court was not punishing them simply for holding beliefs, but for acting on them.

When Chow argued that a belief never acted upon was hardly a belief, Lee replied: “Then it depends on whether your belief is permitted by law.”

There, in a single exchange, was Hong Kong’s new reality: A belief in democracy may be tolerated — until it is acted upon.

The case was never merely about Chow. In her written statement, she said: “This is my sincere belief. And it is not mine alone — the 30 years of candlelight in Victoria Park have already proved that.”

For 30 years, Hong Kongers gathered in Victoria Park to commemorate the Tiananmen Massacre of June 4, 1989. Parents brought children. Friends gathered after work. People carried candles to mourn people they had never known and demanded accountability for what happened that year in Beijing.

I was born and raised in Hong Kong. To people of my generation, the June 4 vigil was not some clandestine conspiracy against the state. It was the collective conscience of millions.

Year after year, Victoria Park became a sea of candlelight — a declaration that even if something could not be remembered openly on the other side of the border, it would be remembered there.

Legally, the millions who attended the vigils were not defendants, but if the cause pursued by the alliance was criminal, what does that say about those who stood with it for 30 years? Were we wrong to light those candles? To remember the dead? To believe that dictatorship is wrong and democracy is right?

That is why Chow’s refusal to seek leniency matters. The state was passing judgement not merely on former leaders of the alliance, but on all Hong Kongers who shared Chow’s beliefs.

Chow was answering for more than herself. The state can prohibit the vigil. It can imprison the organizers it, but it cannot retrospectively extinguish those candles. Power over the present is not ownership of the past.

I do not remember those candlelit nights as a crime. I do not believe the people sitting quietly in Victoria Park were criminals. I will not allow a judgement to tell me that they were.

Chow could not bring the vigil back or overturn the verdict, but she could refuse to surrender the meaning of what had happened. She could refuse to repent on our behalf. And she did.

“What we did was open and honorable. Our consciences are clear. We have no crime to repent,” she said.

John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong living in Taiwan.