The Hong Kong Activist Who Called Washington’s Bluff

On the morning of June 30, 2020, Joshua Wong walked into an office tower called the St. John’s Building, directly across the street from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. He carried nothing but his cellphone.

The repressive machinery of mainland China was closing in on the city where he had spent almost half of his young life fighting for democracy, and though for six years he had curated an image as a fearless international icon, that morning, Wong felt panicked. He had decided to take his chances by appealing to the conscience of the most powerful democracy in the world.

Wong was a skinny, toothy teen in 2014, when his student activism in the Umbrella Movement catapulted him to global renown: Time magazine dubbed him “The Face of Protest.” He served a short prison sentence and was released in June 2019, into the tear-gas-tinged humidity of Hong Kong’s summer of discontent. Again he took the democracy movement’s cause to the press, becoming its international advocate, urging European powers to take a harder line on Beijing and calling for Washington to impose sanctions against those who throttled Hong Kong’s freedoms.

[Read: The fracturing of Hong Kong’s democracy movement]

But in the summer of 2020, with the world in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Chinese officials put the final touches on a national-security law that effectively criminalized dissent and reengineered the very character of a once freewheeling city. Those found guilty under its provisions could be sentenced to prison for life.

Now Hong Kong’s political groups and civil-society organizations were preparing to disband. Shops were pulling protest art off their walls. People were selling apartments and saying