By Christopher Mung
After five gruelling years in detention, it came as no surprise that Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung were found guilty by Hong Kong’s national security court. The courtroom drama may be over, but the real judgement has yet to be delivered. One day, when history sits in judgement, it will not be Lee or Chow in the dock. It will be the dictators and their accomplices who imprisoned dissidents, silenced opposition and shed the blood of their own people.
The court’s verdict runs to more than 200 pages. Yet the logic behind its catalogue of supposed “evidence” can be reduced to a grotesque rewriting of language. When it comes to June 4, a “call” becomes “incitement”; “remembrance” becomes “hostility”; opposition to one-party rule becomes the “spreading of hatred”. It is the living embodiment of the Newspeak imagined by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The courtroom becomes an extension of the thought police. Exhibitions organised by the Hong Kong Alliance, slogans, online campaigns – everywhere, “thought crimes” can supposedly be found. Most absurdly of all, the defendants’ years of steadfastness are themselves recast as evidence of guilt: their refusal to “turn back” is portrayed as an aggravating act, as though persistence in one’s convictions were itself a crime.
However elaborate the sophistry, the words of Lu Xun remain true: lies written in ink can never conceal a history written in blood.
At its heart, this trial is an attempt by a regime responsible for the massacre of its own people to erase and rewrite its past crimes and to place in the dock those who insist on preserving the memory of the dead and demanding accountability for the bloodshed.
Those found guilty today are not merely Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung. In a very real sense, it is also the countless Hongkongers who once stood in Victoria Park holding candles, year after year, refusing to let the victims of June 4 be forgotten and insisting that justice was still possible.
Lee and Chow are paying the price on behalf of all of us. They have taken upon themselves the thorns and walked the hardest part of the road.
The stronger the memory, the more frightened a regime becomes. And the more frightened it becomes, the more ruthlessly it seeks to suppress that memory – exposing, in the process, its own true character.
The court’s reasoning can ultimately be reduced to a few simple propositions: anything that challenges the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power is deemed a threat to national security; “ending one-party rule” challenges that grip; therefore, it is a threat to national security.
It may look like a neat syllogism. But it rests on a deeply flawed premise: that challenging the Communist Party’s political dominance is synonymous with endangering the state itself. In doing so, it deliberately conflates two entirely different concepts, the state and the Party.
Chow Hang-tung exposed the authoritarian logic behind this argument during her own defence. In essence, she asked: if the prosecution’s logic is correct, does it not mean that this country can only ever be ruled by the Communist Party, and that its people are merely subjects who must obey and never allowed to oppose, or to seek change?
History tells us otherwise.
However powerful those in office may appear today, no privileged ruling class lasts for ever, and no authoritarian government can permanently monopolise the interpretation of history.
In Taiwan, the Kaohsiung Incident – better known as the Formosa Incident – and in South Korea, the Gwangju Uprising, those in power once sought to use the law, the machinery of the state and official narratives to portray dissenters as criminals and enemies of the nation.
Yet when history turned the page, those suppressed memories did not disappear. On the contrary, the persecution, convictions and trials that had once provoked grief and anger became sources of strength for democratic movements. They ultimately became milestones that neither Taiwan nor South Korea could avoid on their path towards democracy.
Justice may be delayed, but it cannot be silenced for ever. The blood debts and abuses of dictatorships do not simply disappear. Sooner or later, they face the judgement of history.
In Hong Kong today, the authorities may have the power to declare a person guilty, ban a candle, erase a slogan or lock away a chapter of history.
But they can never command our conscience. They cannot undo what happened. And they cannot determine our future for ever.
The trial of the Hong Kong Alliance may be over.
But the Alliance’s story is not.
Because the real judgement is yet to come.
Graphic: Pulse HK News