Joshua Wong appears in court on a ‘collusion with foreign forces’ charge…
He was arrested in June last year while in jail. Wong is currently serving a four-year-and-eight-month jail sentence for his involvement in … election primaries in 2020, in which he pleaded guilty.
In the present case, the 29-year-old stands accused of conspiring with self-exiled activist Nathan Law and “other persons unknown” between July 1 and November 23, 2020, to request foreign countries, organisations, or individuals based overseas to impose sanctions, blockades or engage in other hostile activities against Hong Kong or China.
…Magistrate Victor So said in August last year that Wong’s [foreign collusion] case would be transferred from the magistrate’s court to the High Court, where the maximum penalty is life imprisonment. At the magistrate’s court, the maximum penalty is two years, or three years when a defendant faces more than one offence.
What’s going on? If he is released, he could (in the view of worry-prone people in authority) become the focus of a rival power structure – so he must stay in prison.
Weekend reading for economics geeks: from Elias Rutten – a history of how Japan became a manufacturing powerhouse, then entered decades of stagnation…
It is impossible to look at contemporary China without seeing Japan’s shadow. China is living through the earlier stages of a comparable exhaustion. Japan, thirty-five years ahead on the curve, shows what the late stages look like.
J.W.
It may be just a pit
Of boredom, fear, and depression;
But some men are made by it,
Made by prison;
And if it is his fate
To be there even longer,
May he grow, and learn, and meditate,
And come out stronger.
Appreciate the sentiment, Knownot, but prisons in Hong Kong, much less China, are not known for their rehabilitative capabilities. Especially for political prisoners.
It’s mind blowing and bloodboilingly infuriating that what started as an idealistic (and completely legal) pro-democracy mission by a barely teenage boy should culminate in a life sentence to an authoritarian gulag.
@steve – I think the government defines “rehabilitation” as learning to love Big Brother.
Joshua has obviously not grovelled so another go at breaking his spirit.