Hong Kong jails Tiananmen vigil organisers for up to seven years and three months

A Hong Kong High Court panel sitting at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts sentenced three former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China on Friday, 11 September. The charge was a single count of inciting others to subvert state power under the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.

Chow Hang-tung, 41, a barrister and former vice-chair of the Alliance, received seven years and three months. Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, a labour organiser and former chairman, received seven years. Albert Ho Chun-yan, 74, a lawyer and former lawmaker who pleaded guilty in January, received five years and two months. The dissolved Alliance itself was fined HK$1.5 million, payable within three months.

Lee and Chow were convicted last month after a trial without a jury before three designated national security judges. They had pleaded not guilty. Ho admitted the charge before the trial opened. The alleged offence ran from 1 July 2020 to 8 September 2021. Under the statute, “serious” cases carry five to ten years. The court placed Chow and Lee in that upper band.

What the judges treated as the offence

The Alliance organised Hong Kong’s annual candlelight vigil in Victoria Park for people killed when the People’s Liberation Army cleared Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. For three decades those gatherings were legal in the city and banned on the mainland. They stopped after the national security law came into force and after police sealed the park around the anniversary.

Judges focused on the group’s slogan calling for an end to one-party dictatorship. A court summary in August said Lee and Chow had “incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power.” The panel treated the Alliance’s core mission as a challenge to the Communist Party.

Chow told the court in May that the law itself was on trial. In her mitigation statement she wrote that she would rather be a criminal than a person who betrays their conscience. When judges asked whether she wanted leniency, she declined. Lee’s wife, Elizabeth Tang, said after sentencing that she could not imagine her husband spending another three years in jail and that he would appeal. Lee and Chow have been in custody since 2021.

The last large vigil case

Public commemoration of 4 June was one of the clearest differences between Hong Kong and the rest of China. Crowds of tens of thousands filled the football pitches at Victoria Park each year. After the 2019 protests, police closed the park on the anniversary, questioned people who arrived alone with a candle, and pressed the Alliance to disband. The government froze the group’s assets in 2021 and ordered it to take down its websites.

The sentences close one of the last high-profile national security trials still sitting in the city. Other opposition parties have dissolved. The Democratic Party, which Ho helped to found and which was once the largest opposition group, disbanded last year. Human Rights Watch called the terms an attempt to punish memory. Hong Kong officials say the law restored order after 2019 and that courts apply it as written.

The fine on the Alliance is separate from the prison terms. HK$1.5 million is about $190,000. The group no longer exists as a working organisation, so collection is a bookkeeping and political act as much as a fiscal one. It records that the entity, not only the three people, was found to have broken the 2020 statute.

What remains of 4 June in the city

Victoria Park is now closed or placed under heavy police watch in early June. Museums and bookshops that stocked material on 1989 have pulled titles or shut. Schools no longer teach the crackdown as they once did. The courtroom on Friday was one of the few official spaces left in which the old slogan was read aloud, and it was read as evidence.

Chow’s term is the longest of the three. She is also the youngest. If the sentence stands after appeal, she would be nearly 50 at release, having spent her early forties in custody. Lee would leave prison in his mid-seventies. Ho, who cooperated with the court by pleading guilty, still received more than five years.

The national security law allows Beijing to exercise jurisdiction in some cases and requires judges on these files to be designated by the city’s leader. There is no jury. Those design choices, written in 2020, produced Friday’s numbers. The vigils that once filled a public park are now a completed prosecution file and a fine on a group that no longer meets.