Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, were found guilty on Friday of "incitement to subversion" under Beijing's 2020 national security law. Their crime: leading the Hong Kong Alliance, which for three decades organised the only candlelight vigils on Chinese soil marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Each faces up to 10 years in prison. A third defendant, former lawmaker Albert Ho, 74, pleaded guilty in January. The case turned not on acts of violence but on a slogan — "end to one-party rule" — which the court found was intended to "cause others to lose confidence in the Chinese Communist party by stirring up hostility and causing division." The defence argued freedom of speech. Amnesty International called the subversion definitions "vague, overly broad and arbitrary." The court was unpersuaded. Chow, a Cambridge-educated barrister who represented herself, told the court in May that "the law itself was on trial." The structural logic here is stark. Hong Kong and Macau were formerly the only places under Chinese sovereignty where the 4 June killings could be publicly mourned. That exception has now been criminalised. The national security law, imposed after the 2019 pro-democracy protests, has been the mechanism: public commemoration banned, Alliance leaders charged in 2021, held in custody since, convicted in 2025. The sequence is not ambiguous. From prison, Chow wrote to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham: "They are trying to rewrite Hong Kong history … they certainly want to erase some memories, or memories of some chapters in our history." She called on Britain to adopt "a more robust stance in the face of the growing threat from a totalitarian and aggressive China." The UK's Indo-Pacific minister Rosie Winterton responded that the verdict "undermines the commitments China made to Hong Kong under the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration" and called for the national security law to be repealed. The courtroom scene told its own story. Dozens of police officers gathered outside. Members of the public had queued for days for seats. Lee made a heart-shaped gesture with his hands before being led away. Supporters outside spoke plainly: "This case illustrates the absolute power of Beijing in reshaping Hong Kong's civil society through the national security law." Hong Kong was promised certain political freedoms not granted elsewhere in China when sovereignty transferred in 1997. The Sino-British Joint Declaration was lodged with the United Nations. Most of the city's opposition leaders have now been detained or have fled. Authorities say the national security law was needed to restore order after the 2019 protests. What the law has actually restored is compliance — civil society has been dismantled, independent media shuttered, and now the act of remembering the dead has been reclassified as subversion. The conviction completes a specific project: there is no longer any public space on Chinese-controlled territory where the Tiananmen massacre can be lawfully commemorated. The vigil, which once drew tens of thousands, has been converted from a civic ritual into a criminal act. The cost is borne by two individuals in the dock and by the principle that a government's legitimacy can survive its citizens remembering what it did.
