// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Remember Hong Kong
Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move
We should not let Hong Kong fade away. We should not let Joshua Wong fade away. Or Jimmy Lai, or others. Let me elaborate.
For a few years—2019 and 2020 in particular—the eyes of the world were on Hong Kong. It was probably the chief battleground in the perpetual war between freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship.
The Chinese Communist Party was determined to make Hong Kong a city like any other in China—unfree, totalitarian. Millions of Hong Kongers were determined to keep the freedom they had enjoyed. The CCP has won, at least for now.
As Perry Link, the eminent scholar of China, remarked to me, we saw a great city “murdered before our eyes.” When I was in my 20s, I saw great cities liberated: Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw … To see a reversal was jarring and painful.
Jimmy Lai is probably the best-known political prisoner in Hong Kong. The 78-year-old businessman and democracy champion has been in prison since December 2020. (For a piece of mine about him, published in 2023, go here.)
Also well-known is Joshua Wong, age 29. He has been in prison for a month longer than Jimmy Lai.
Both of them would be quick to tell you that there are other political prisoners, less well-known, who deserve all the admiration and help we can muster.
Joshua Wong, as the BBC put it, is “the poster child for political activism in Hong Kong.” In October 2014, when he was 18, he was on the cover of Time magazine: “The Face of Protest.” The cover also said, “Teenager Joshua Wong and the youth of Hong Kong are standing up for democracy. Can they win?”
It transpired that they could not—although, as I alluded to above, we are entitled to take a longer view.