Protesters holding up a banner outside the West Kowloon Magistrates Court before the trial against 47 pro-democracy activists on February 6, 2023, in Hong Kong. (Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto via Getty Images) 

Last week at Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court, show trials of pro-democracy activists began. Writing in the New York Post, Hudson Senior Fellow and China Center Director Miles Yu explains what happened and offers three lessons.

Key Insights

1. Forty-seven Hong Kongers were put on trial for supporting their city’s democratic norms.

Inside that once-august tribunal, the trials of 47 of Hong Kong’s leading democracy activists began under the national security law that the People’s Republic of China imposed in June 2020, a law that has been widely condemned as a crackdown on civil liberties and political dissent. Their supposed crime? Advocating for the democratic norms and traditions the city has long held dear. The national security law classifies all these actions as “subversion,” and Beijing considers unforgivable the activists’ support of a July 2020 primary election aimed at building democratic opposition to one-party rule.

2. The trials undermine the city’s autonomy.

These trials are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to stamp out Hong Kong’s freedoms and end the “high degree autonomy” granted in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which established the conditions under which control of the global metropolis was to be transferred from London to Beijing in 1997. Foremost among these conditions was the constitutional principle of “one country, two systems,” which guaranteed Hong Kong the right to keep its legal, political, and capitalist economic structures while retaining its essential human rights and freedoms. While the proceedings that began in Hong Kong this week will almost certainly result in sham guilty verdicts for the defendants, the trials’ very existence renders a definitive verdict on the character of the Chinese government.

3. The Hong Kong prosecutions offer three valuable lessons.

First, the trials prove that a free system cannot exist under autocratic rule. When the people of Hong Kong choose freedom and the central government desires autocracy, the proceedings demonstrate conclusively that Beijing gets its way. Second, the prosecution of democracy activists, professors, journalists, and students—all core participants in a free society—illustrates that the word of the Chinese government cannot be trusted. What began in 1997 as a promise of 50 years of autonomy has ended decades early in a West Kowloon kangaroo court. Every unfair verdict handed down at the trial’s conclusion will further shred the credibility of China’s rulers. And a country without credibility cannot be a leader of the world. Third, while Beijing once hoped that its handling of Hong Kong would serve as an example for Taiwan, China’s diabolical mismanagement of the city has proven to the Taiwanese that they can only be free outside Beijing’s orbit.

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length. 

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