The Hong Kong High Court on Tuesday sentenced 45 rights advocates to up to 10 years in prison following a national security trial, illustrating the contempt that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has for democracy and its insatiable desire to crush all who threaten its monopoly on political power. The punishments are a stark and important lesson for Taiwanese.
The people were arrested in 2021 on charges of conspiracy to commit subversion following unofficial primaries in 2020 to maximize their chances of winning a majority in a Hong Kong Legislative Council election. Their actions were also a response to Beijing’s two decades of suppression of democracy, and broken promises of giving the territory “a high degree of autonomy” and a pathway to universal suffrage under the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and in Hong Kong’s Basic Law.
Among those sentenced were legal academic Benny Tai (戴耀廷), who shot to fame as a key leader of the “Umbrella movement” in 2014. He received the longest sentence — 10 years.
Another is former student leader Joshua Wong (黃之鋒), who in 2011, aged just 15, played a leading role in protests against a national education plan — analogous to a campaign in Taiwan in 2015 to oppose curriculum revisions. Wong was sentenced to four years and eight months.
“This move imprisons a generation of civil society leaders for holding a primary; trying to fight an election using democratic means,” journalist and author Louise Lim (林慕蓮) wrote on X.
The similarities between the situations in Hong Kong and Taiwan in their struggle for democracy and resisting the CCP go further than the “one country, two systems” model that Beijing wants. Taiwan and Hong Kong have traveled on similar trajectories in the 20th and 21st centuries. Both experienced authoritarianism, rapid economic growth and democratization at about the same time. Both are the targets of a rising China’s hegemonic project to impose its rule in its project of “Chinese rejuvenation.”
The protests that arose in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 21st century — such as the Wild Strawberry and Sunflower movements in Taiwan, and the Occupy and Umbrella movements in Hong Kong — cannot be understood without factoring in China’s imperial project to create economic dependence to serve its political purposes, sociologist Ho Ming-sho (何明修) wrote in Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement.
However, while Taiwan’s protests were successful in protecting the nation’s democracy and creating a more open and diverse society — such as in resisting the imposition of a cross-strait services and trade agreement — Hong Kong’s protests and the dreams of democracy were crushed by the CCP. While rights advocates in Taiwan have gone on to hold elected office — Sunflower movement figures Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) and Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) are a legislator and deputy secretary-general of the National Security Council respectively, their counterparts in Hong Kong — such as Tai and Wong, and many others — have been thrown in jail. It is a stark and tragic lesson.
Today, “Taiwan maintains a vibrant democracy following a prolonged one-party authoritarian regime that lasted until 1987, whereas post-colonial Hong Kong is trapped in unfinished democratization,” Ho wrote.
Taiwanese must remain vigilant. The “united front” tactics the CCP used to subjugate Hong Kong — sowing division and co-opting politicians to build economic dependence — it is also using on Taiwan.
As Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) wrote on X on Wednesday: “The criminalization of democracy in Hong Kong recalls the dark days of Taiwan’s Martial Law era. It is also a reminder that we cannot take freedom for granted. Defending our democracy and our freedom to think, to speak, to vote and to live, is a duty.”
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