Joshua Wong, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to collusion for lobbying Western lawmakers, a case that shows how China treats international outreach as a national security crime.
The maximum penalty for colluding with foreign forces is life in prison.
Mr. Wong was accused of conspiring with other campaigners to lobby lawmakers, particularly those in the United States like Nancy Pelosi and Marco Rubio, to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and China. The campaigners sought to pressure officials in Beijing and Hong Kong for greater democratic rights in the semiautonomous territory.
Mr. Wong, who turns 30 next month, was one of the youngest activists in a democracy movement that was quashed in 2020 after Beijing introduced a sweeping national security law that effectively outlawed political dissent in Hong Kong.
In a sign of the sensitivity around the case, police officers in tactical vests and police vehicles surrounded the courthouse where Mr. Wong’s case was being heard on Wednesday.
He is already serving an almost five-year prison term for his role in an unofficial primary election in 2020 organized by the city’s pro-democracy camp that the authorities deemed subversive. That case, the city’s largest national security trial, led to the conviction of Mr. Wong and more than 40 other former politicians and activists.
Mr. Wong was arrested on the foreign collusion charge in June last year while in prison. On Wednesday, his lawyers urged the judge, William Tam, to consider a lighter sentence, saying Mr. Wong had matured substantially and hoped to one day leave prison so that he could take care of his aging parents.
Mr. Wong’s repeated prosecutions reflect the drastic political changes that have taken place in Hong Kong, a former British colony, since it was returned to China in 1997. At the time, Beijing agreed to preserve Western-style civil liberties that are not available in mainland China, such as freedom of speech, for 50 years.
Today, the city’s legislature is devoid of any significant opposition and independent media and members of civil society have largely been muzzled. Bookstores accused of carrying subversive books have been closed.
Mr. Wong’s plea on Wednesday came seven months after a court sentenced Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy media tycoon, to 20 years in prison on charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious materials under the national security law.
The judge said that Mr. Wong would be sentenced at a later date, but did not provide any further details.
Mr. Wong rose to prominence in 2012, when at he age of 14 he led a student movement to oppose the introduction of a Chinese national education curriculum in Hong Kong. He later became one of the most internationally-recognized faces of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests that called for people in Hong Kong to be given the right to vote for their leader. He appeared on the covers of Western magazines and was the subject of a June Pictures documentary, “Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower,” distributed by Netflix.
Western legal experts say that Mr. Wong and other pro-democracy activists have not been given fair trials by Hong Kong’s judges, who are handpicked by the city’s chief executive to handle national security cases.
“It’s clear that the Hong Kong government has made a decision to keep Joshua behind bars more or less indefinitely,” said Thomas E. Kellogg, the executive director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law. “They’re doing this precisely because he is a prominent political figure, someone whom Hong Kongers around the world respect and admire.”
“The Hong Kong government may hope that Hong Kongers will forget about him if they put him away for another decade or more,” he continued. “But I don’t think that will happen.”
