Hong Kong's Tiananmen activists convicted in national security trial

By Elena Rossi · August 21, 2026

There are certain acts of public mourning that require no intellectual justification, only endurance.

When Memory Itself Becomes a Crime

There are certain acts of public mourning that require no intellectual justification, only endurance. They are simply necessary rituals for a collective conscience: remembering those who fell when the state preferred silence. The recent conviction of Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung in Hong Kong—for organizing vigils to commemorate the deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown—is not merely a legal proceeding; it is an act of cultural vandalism. It signals that, under Beijing’s imposed National Security Law, even the simple, annual gathering of people to mourn the dead constitutes "incitement to subversion." The charge summary stated they “incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power.” To treat remembrance as sedition is to declare that history itself has an expiration date.

The Architecture of Manufactured Treason

The facts are starkly illustrative of this institutional decay. For three decades, Hong Kong was one of the few places on Chinese soil where public vigils for those killed in 1989 could take place. This tradition, which drew tens of thousands annually, represented a shared cultural space—a piazza where history refused to be edited. Yet, following the massive anti-government protests of 2019 and the subsequent imposition of the National Security Law in 2020, that space vanished.

The legal mechanism for this erasure was chillingly efficient. Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance, were charged in 2021. The case centered on their slogan demanding an “end to one-party rule.” While the defense argued—as reported by BBC—that they genuinely believed they were acting within existing freedoms of speech, the judges rejected this premise outright. They found that the activists "intended to cause others to lose confidence in the Chinese Communist party by stirring up hostility and causing division."

This is where the state’s power reveals its true nature: it does not prosecute dissent; it prosecutes memory. As Chow Hang-tung told the court, “the law itself was on trial.” This sentiment rings with a profound historical resonance. The mechanism employed here—using vague, overly broad definitions of "subversion" to criminalize peaceful assembly and political critique—is nothing new under the guise of modern law. It is merely the latest iteration of an ancient, brutal pattern: The Great Purge.

When Subversion Is Simply Speaking Truth

In the Soviet Union, during The Great Purge (1936–1938), Joseph Stalin’s regime utilized highly publicized show trials to eliminate perceived internal threats from the Communist Party. Like Hong Kong today, the state did not need evidence of actual treason; it needed only the charge of subversion—a charge that could be retroactively applied to anyone who dared question the foundational legitimacy of the ruling power.

The shared mechanism is unmistakable: a powerful central authority uses an ostensibly neutral legal framework (the National Security Law) to manufacture dissent, prosecute those who uphold inconvenient truths, and thereby purify the political body by eliminating its critical memory. The judges' warning that even acts "may not necessarily involve the use of violence or threat of violence" would be in breach of law is precisely the chilling logic of every totalitarian purge.

The strongest case against these activists—and indeed, against any free society—is the claim that they were merely engaging in political rhetoric, using slogans like “end one-party dictatorship.” But to accept this premise is to concede that the right to critique a system’s foundational structure is itself an act of crime. As Al Jazeera reported, Amnesty International correctly noted that the case relies on "vague, overly broad and arbitrary definitions of 'subversion'."

The verdict confirms what we already knew: when the state fears its own history, it will weaponize law against those who merely remember it. The conviction of Lee and Chow is not a failure of democracy; it is a success for authoritarian control. It sends a clear message to every citizen in Hong Kong, and indeed everywhere else where memory is inconvenient, that the only acceptable version of reality is the one dictated from above.

Hong Kong's Tiananmen activists convicted in national security trial

When Memory Itself Becomes a Crime

The Architecture of Manufactured Treason

When Subversion Is Simply Speaking Truth

Sources