HKFP reports on the case of Wong Kwok-ngon (aka Wong On-yin and Ang Bo), a writer and YouTube commentator. He was taken in for questioning by NatSec police on December 6 last year shortly before participating in a planned press conference…
…to discuss topics including building renovations and unscrupulous tendering procedures for construction projects – matters which came to light in the wake of the [Wang Fuk Court] blaze.
Wong then talked about his meeting with the police in two live-streamed YouTube videos, and was arrested days later.
He has been in jail since last December, and is now in court.
Under the Article 23 NatSec law, it is illegal to ‘divulge information related to a national security investigation’ – even if it’s your own case. (If a guy is taken in for questioning, where does he tell his wife he has been all day? Maybe: “I cannot answer that question on grounds of national security”.)
Wong said [police sergeant] Li only told him he could not reveal details of the meeting, but did not say that he could not even mention that a meeting had occurred.
He also said he told Li at the time that news of the National Security Department summoning him for a meeting had already been reported widely in local media.
And overseas. A CPJ statement at the time.
Wong is also being charged with expressing the wrong views…
…Prosecutors pointed to “seditious content” including Wong’s [YouTube] comments that Hongkongers lived in a “prison-like environment”…
With no sense of irony.
In the (probably paywalled) Spectator, Benedict Rogers marks Joshua Wong’s 30th birthday…
Since 2020, Wong has served multiple sentences for participating in or “inciting” unauthorised assemblies, including a peaceful vigil to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre. In 2024, he was sentenced to four years and eight months, charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the draconian National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing. A year later, he was hit with a second charge under the National Security Law, of collusion with foreign forces – an offence which could carry a life sentence. Last month, he pled guilty to this charge in court, and is awaiting sentencing.
The truth is, Wong should never have spent a day in jail. He never advocated violence, did not promote secession, and never committed what any free or open society would regard as any crime…
Civicus Lens does a Q&A with Frances Hui (click on the questions to see the answer)…
What is the government trying to achieve with this case?
It has never been clearer that the government aims to keep a symbol of my generation’s democracy movement out of public life. It also wants to wear down his spirit through years of isolation. That’s why prosecutors waited nearly five years to bring this charge, until Joshua had almost finished his sentence.
The case also shows the government using the law even more aggressively against people it can still physically reach, to punish ties with those it cannot reach. Prosecutors linked Joshua to Nathan Law, an exiled activist with a bounty on his head. They treated their years of shared international advocacy, including meeting foreign lawmakers, giving media interviews and calling for international pressure, as a continuing criminal conspiracy.
This turns years of lawful political advocacy into a crime…
From the Jamestown Foundation, a George Magnus piece on how AI will ‘deepen the divide between China’s two economies’…
The 15th Five-Year Plan places AI in pole position of the “modern industrial eco-system,” comprising all manner of manufacturing, technology, infrastructure, and control over global supply chains.
The very policies that are powering the industrial side of the PRC economy are exacerbating structural weaknesses and flaws in the much larger part of the economy where excessive debt, low productivity, high unemployment, and fiscal and financial failing are becoming more deeply entrenched.