In this world, winners become kings and losers outlaws. No parents, anywhere, want to see their children end up behind bars.
A video circulating on social media — timed to the June 4th anniversary — shows footage from the 2014 Occupy Central movement. In it, a girl of six or seven sings the revolutionary anthem Who Has Not Yet Awakened in a sweet, childlike voice. Forty years ago, that might have been moving. Forty years on, all it inspires is dread — a gut-level warning: watch out, don't get played.
Feeding a child with political singing. What does early political exposure do to a young mind?
That video calls two recent news stories to mind.
Law Student Convicted of Riot on Retrial
A first-year law student at a British university returned to Hong Kong in 2019 and joined a riot in Wan Chai on August 30. She was acquitted of riot charges in 2021. The Department of Justice appealed successfully, and the Court of Appeal overturned the acquittal and ordered a retrial before the original magistrate. On June 9, Judge Lee Chun-man convicted Tang Ka-yan — who was 21 at the time of the offense — of riot.
Tang had argued there was no direct evidence of her participation — that she had simply been passing by. Judge Lee disagreed. He considered the location where she was stopped, along with her attire and equipment: black top, black trousers, gas mask, umbrella, and hiking pole. The cumulative weight of the circumstantial evidence, as the Court of Appeal had found, was overwhelming. It ruled out any possibility she was an innocent bystander. She was convicted of riot.
Now 28, Tang wept in the dock after the verdict. Her mother broke down in tears. Given the charge is riot, a substantial sentence is expected.
A law student committing a riot is knowing breach of the law. Her legal education abroad evidently taught her nothing about respecting it.
Construction Worker Convicted of Sedition
A construction worker committed a series of seditious acts between 2024 and 2025. On October 2, 2024 — the day after National Day — he wrote seditious messages on pieces of paper and threw them from the window of his flat in On Tat Estate, Kwun Tong. On December 5, 2025, two days before the Legislative Council election, he threw another batch of seditious leaflets from the same flat. Police arrested him on April 21 this year.
Under caution, the defendant admitted throwing the papers. He stated he had done so to express his discontent with the SAR government, including calls for the public to boycott the vote. He also said he harbored resentment toward Mainland residents, blaming them for taking jobs from local workers — which was why he had written phrases such as "Kill mainlanders" on the papers.
In mitigation, the defense noted that the defendant had a low level of education and had worked in construction throughout his life. The events of 2019 and the pandemic hit him hard — his work shifted from full-time to casual, and his income dropped sharply. Those grievances, the defense argued, led to the offending.
Chief Magistrate So Wai-tak was unsparing. He found the defendant had acted with premeditation — deliberately choosing significant dates to throw targeted messages from his flat. The sentence: 10 months' imprisonment.
Some may feel 10 months for throwing a few pieces of paper is steep. But consider the defendant's record: 23 prior criminal convictions spanning dishonesty, violence, drugs, and public order offenses — including illegal protests — with a previous sentence of four years. He is a serial offender, and the court treated him accordingly.
No Escaping the Consequences
The two cases, taken together, send a clear message. Whether a female university student or a male construction worker, using unlawful means to protest or riot ultimately triggers legal consequences. If only they had thought twice before acting.
For those with deeply entrenched anti-government views, asking them to be patriotic — or even supportive of the government — is, of course, expecting the impossible. But rational adults must understand this: if you choose to confront the government through extreme and unlawful means, you must be prepared to pay the price. The mitigation pleas in both cases suggest that neither defendant had truly reckoned with the possibility of arrest and imprisonment.
Most parents dream of their children achieving great things. Few could imagine them ending up as convicts. For those who filmed their young children speaking out against the SAR government — did they ever stop to think? Such actions plant anti-government ideas in those children's minds from an early age. Those ideas can one day lead them to break the law and face the consequences. Did those parents consider that such footage could lead other people's children astray — pushing them toward failed attempts at subversion, a life on the wrong side of the law, and a ruined future?
If you want to ruin yourself, that is your business. Don't drag others down with you.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
Two national security cases have recently wrapped up in quick succession.
On Thursday (10 September), two members of the "Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union" were sentenced to three years, and three years and two months in prison respectively. Both had pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to commit secession" under the Hong Kong National Security Law.
Then today (11 September), sentence was passed in the "incitement to subversion" case against the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (the Alliance). Albert Ho Chun-yan, who pleaded guilty, was jailed for five years and two months.
The two defendants who pleaded not guilty, Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, were jailed for seven years and seven years and three months respectively.
The judge made it clear in sentencing why the Alliance case fell into the "serious circumstances" category. The case did not involve violence or any concrete method put forward by the defendants for "ending one-party rule."
But society was in turmoil at the time of the offence.
The defendants' activities continued for a full 14 months after the National Security Law came into force. Those activities were citywide in scope and attracted widespread attention.
The defendants believed that what they advocated might be unlawful, yet persisted regardless. The offending was premeditated.
The trials and tribulations Hong Kong has weathered since the handover amount to one giant political experiment. Every kind of political proposition has been put to the test, and we have seen the results.
Had these cases arisen in the early days after the handover, the verdicts might have read very differently to some.
Two young men aged 25 to 27, jailed for more than three years over a "nation-building union" that looked doomed to fail, might have seemed like the court making a mountain out of a molehill.
The same goes for the Alliance. Had its standing committee members been prosecuted in those early days, some might have felt they were merely chanting slogans to promote democracy. Perfectly harmless, undeserving of arrest and imprisonment.
But after more than two decades of development, we can now see with total clarity what these incendiary political activities can achieve.
From the mass march against Article 23 legislation in 2003, to the illegal Occupy Central movement in 2014, to the all-out riots of 2019, unlawful activities escalated step by step until violent protests spun completely out of control.
The breaking point came on 11 November 2019 with the Ma On Shan incident, in which a man was set on fire. An utterly depraved manifestation of violent lawbreaking.
The perpetrators believed they held the truth in their hands. They doused an unarmed civilian in flammable liquid and set him alight, intending to burn him to death. His only fault was trying to stop rioters vandalizing the MTR station.
Political violence had reached a point of no return, spiraling beyond control.
At the core of the Alliance stood the so-called traditional pan-democrats. They claimed to be promoting democracy in Hong Kong and the country. Yet they turned a blind eye to the street violence they themselves had incited, at times even tacitly condoning it.
One need only look at what was exposed during the trial of Jimmy Lai to see this plainly.
Back then, Lai instructed the senior management of Apple Daily to uphold "no distinction between the peaceful and the valiant".
In other words, they were not to draw a line between themselves and the valiant faction advocating violent struggle. That alone showed that the movement's descent into violence had the backing of big bosses behind the scenes.
And behind these local opposition bosses stood the political forces of the United States and the West.
Take Lee Cheuk-yan, a central figure in the Alliance case.
The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), to which he belonged, relied for years on funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Beginning in 1994, the HKCTU applied every year for grants from the NED-affiliated American Center for International Labor Solidarity. The cumulative total came to HK$13 million.
Here was an organization directly funded by a foreign government, running labor and social movements in Hong Kong. Who could believe it thinks independently?
Piece the whole picture together and the through-line becomes complete. Beginning in the late 1980s, in the closing stages of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the CIA set out to overthrow the entire socialist camp led by the Soviet Union.
China's "June Fourth incident" also occurred against this backdrop.
While China and the United States had not yet fallen out completely, such activities proceeded in the shadows. After the rupture, and especially after Washington launched its trade war against China in 2018, the United States embarked on subversion against China without scruple.
These were not activities to promote the development of democracy in China. They were subversive operations aimed at toppling state power.
Consider this: the CIA today openly recruits spies targeting China. That tells you how grave the situation is.
With the Alliance case tried and sentenced, the legal boundary for such acts of subversion has now been clearly drawn. Do not imagine that chanting a few incendiary slogans or setting up some reactionary organizations is harmless. A single spark can start a prairie fire.
Drawing the legal red line is precisely about nipping these subversive activities in the bud.
Lo Wing-hung
