Joshua Wong is back in the dock. Already serving time in the case “35+” Conspiracy sto Subert the State Power, he has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and collected another 10 years behind bars. The spectacle brings to mind a famous line from the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine, about a person that was nothing more than a cat's-paw.
La Fontaine's fable: The Monkey and the Cat
A Fable Comes Alive
In The Monkey and the Cat (Le Singe et le Chat), La Fontaine spins the classic tale of the cat pulling chestnuts out of the fire. The monkey Bertrand and the cat Raton live under the same roof. One day they spot chestnuts roasting in the hearth.
The cunning monkey talks the cat into raking the chestnuts from the embers with its paw, promising to share the tasty spoils. The cat takes him at his word and, enduring the burn, pokes the chestnuts out one by one. Yet each time a chestnut comes free, the monkey snatches it and eats it on the spot. The promise of sharing is never honored. The cat ends up with a scorched paw and nothing else.
In the real-life version, the United States plays the monkey and Joshua Wong the cat. The other cat, Nathan Law, was not quite so foolish; he fled before the Hong Kong National Security Law took effect on June 30, 2020. Wong wanted to run too, but he ran too late. His biggest mistake was pinning his hopes on Washington.
Joshua Wong (second from left), Nathan Law secretly met US diplomat Julie Eadeh (now the Consul General), in August 2019
The Book That Spills It
In 2023, two American journalists blew the story open. Shibani Mahtani, The Washington Post's former Southeast Asia and Hong Kong bureau chief, and the Post’s contributing writer Timothy McLaughlin co-authored "Among the Braves." The book tracks Joshua Wong's close collusion with officials of the US Consulate General in Hong Kong before and after the Hong Kong National Security Law took effect.
The book does more than tell a tale. It stands as proof of Wong's crime of "conspiracy to collude with foreign forces." It also documents, in damning detail, his failed bid to seek political asylum from the United States.
According to the book, Hong Kong police had already confiscated Wong's passport over other political cases. Desperate to slip into the US Consulate, win asylum and flee China, he made his move on the eve of the National Security Law. On the morning of June 30, 2020, hours before the law took effect at 11 p.m. that night, he walked into St. John's Building in Central. The building sits opposite the US Consulate General and houses its offices. There, he met with two American diplomats.
As the meeting wrapped up, Wong told the two men that he did not want to go back and that he wanted to enter the US Consulate. But the offices in St. John's Building are not the consulate itself, and they fall outside the scope of consular protection. Wong wanted into the Consulate General building across the street. US consulate officials turned him down flat.
The episode the book lays out says it all. Joshua Wong is no hero ready to face death without flinching. He is a discarded pawn with nowhere left to turn.
Pleas to Washington
The book says Wong's asylum bid had a helper in the United States: Au Cheuk-hin, a comrade-in-arms and former standing committee member of Demosisto. Au went through a middleman to an adviser to Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican senator with direct access to Trump. The plea got no answer.
By July 1, the day after the Hong Kong National Security Law took effect, Washington's position had not budged. Wong was still barred from the US Consulate, and his bid for political asylum from outside US territory would not be accepted. So Au sent an email in Wong's name to then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It says "there is a legitimate danger that I become a prime target of arrest and detention … I request US protection so that I may apply for asylum, including as necessary traveling to the US for the purpose of applying for asylum.”
Joshua Wong openly urged sanctions on China
Pompeo called in senior officials to weigh Wong's case. Timing was the problem. Washington was about to shut China's consulate in Houston over espionage claims, and the officials feared that if the announcement landed while Wong was holed up in the US Consulate General in Hong Kong, Beijing might retaliate by closing the Hong Kong consulate. Worse, it could arrest Americans in the city at any time to trade for Wong.
The group also looked at getting Wong out. The only escape route was by sea, through the Taiwan Strait to the Philippines, and a run-in with the Chinese Navy could blow the flight up into an international incident. Pompeo and his advisers made the call: Wong would not be let into the US Consulate, and Washington would not help him leave Hong Kong. An official involved in the process admitted to the authors that when national interests and individual’s interests collide, you try to strike a balance between the two.
Discarded but Still Loyal
The national interests in question were America's. Joshua Wong pulled chestnuts out of the fire for the United States. His reward was to be cast aside.
Wong's real folly came after he had already become a discarded pawn. He still played the willing cat, reaching into the embers to fetch more chestnuts. The Hong Kong National Security Law was already in force. Had he stopped right there, the law's lack of retroactivity would have protected him, and the SAR government could not have prosecuted his earlier acts.
But Wong did not stop. After the law took effect, he kept meeting senior foreign officials face to face. Exiled activists overseas were openly calling for sanctions and hostile measures against China. Wong, still in Hong Kong, stayed in touch with them, reposted their statements, endorsed their appeals, and spread their posts widely through his social media accounts.
By then the evidence against him was conclusive. Once charged, Wong had no choice but to plead guilty.
The Monkey Moves On
Trump was US President in 2020, and he returned to the White House in 2025. On September 23 this year, President Xi Jinping visited the United States, flying into Joint Base Andrews on the outskirts of Washington aboard his special plane.
Trump and First Lady Melania broke with protocol and went to the airport in person, waiting at the foot of the stairs of President Xi's plane to welcome him. Could those who believed Trump back then and went on to betray their country ever have imagined such a scene?
A monkey goes wherever the good things are. Why would it still remember the cat it once tricked?
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
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