Hong Kong activists convicted under national security law for Tiananmen vigils

Lee Cheuk-yan walked into the courtroom on Friday knowing the verdict was already written. The 69-year-old lawmaker and his co-defendant Chow Hang-tung, a 41-year-old lawyer, had been charged with inciting others to subvert state power—a crime that carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. Both were convicted under Hong Kong's national security law, the sweeping legislation introduced by Beijing in 2020 that has fundamentally reshaped what dissent looks like in the territory. A third defendant, Albert Ho, 74, had already pleaded guilty in January. As the verdict was announced, Lee made a heart gesture toward supporters in the gallery and folded his hands in gratitude. Chow smiled.

Their crime was organizing annual vigils to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. For three decades, Hong Kong had been singular in Chinese territory as a place where people could gather each year to remember that day—when troops and tanks rolled into Beijing's central square to crush pro-democracy protests. Estimates of the death toll range from a few hundred to many thousands. The vigils were a form of remembrance that mainland China had made nearly impossible, banning even oblique references to what happened. But in Hong Kong, under the framework of "one country, two systems," the gatherings persisted as an act of collective memory and political conscience.

Lee and Chow were leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance, an organization founded in May 1989, just weeks before the crackdown, to support students holding pro-democracy rallies. Over the next three decades, the Alliance called on authorities to accept responsibility for the massacre, free political prisoners, and introduce democratic reform. It became, in the eyes of Chinese authorities, a "toxic tumour." In 2021, the Alliance's leaders were charged. They have been detained ever since.

The vigils themselves were banned in 2020, officially on grounds of Covid-19 restrictions. They have never resumed. That same year, the national security law came into force, criminalizing a far wider range of dissenting acts: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. The law's language is deliberately expansive. According to the court summary, Lee and Chow "incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power." In May, Chow told the court that the law itself was on trial.

International human rights organizations have seized on the case as evidence of how the law operates in practice. Amnesty International's deputy regional director, Sarah Brooks, said the convictions relied on "vague, overly broad and arbitrary definitions of 'subversion'." She called Lee and Chow "prisoners of conscience who should never have been prosecuted in the first place" and demanded their immediate release. Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, framed the convictions more starkly: they demonstrate "how public displays of mourning have become a crime in Hong Kong."

Chow's legal history adds another layer to the case. In June 2021, she was arrested for "inciting" the public to participate in that year's vigil. She was found guilty, but Hong Kong's top court overturned the conviction in 2022 after a judge ruled that police had not properly justified the vigil's ban. Yet that reversal did not protect her from the broader charges now resulting in conviction. In an interview with the BBC in 2021, weeks before her arrest, she had said simply: "I am prepared to be arrested. That is how Hong Kong is now. I am willing to pay the price for fighting for democracy."

Sentencing is expected at a later date. The maximum penalty of ten years looms over both defendants. Hong Kong's government insists the national security law is necessary to maintain stability. Critics argue it has eroded the territory's autonomy and created a climate of fear in which the space for dissent—once broader than anywhere else in Chinese territory—has contracted to nearly nothing. The vigils that once drew thousands have become, in the eyes of the law, an act of subversion. Remembrance itself is now a crime.