Unfree Speech by Joshua Wong review – a call to arms for the Snapchat generation

The Hong Kong protests leader, a veteran activist at just 23, on his extraordinary decade – and what comes next

By Tim Adams

Joshua Wong addressing the crowd in Hong Kong, 1 January 2020. 

I don’t know if it counts as a demographic anomaly or a new world order, but our social media decade has seen the emergence of teenage political changemakers – the guerrilla wing of influencer culture. 

While Greta Thunberg may have become the most recognisable of these adolescent activists, the model was established by Joshua Wong, who at the age of 14 engineered a rare political climbdown by the Hong Kong government, and by 17 was on the cover of Time magazine as “the Face of Protest”.
Wong, now 23, and having spent many months in prisons and detention centres, is the gnarled veteran leader of the “umbrella movement” against creeping Chinese authoritarianism. 

In a blurb to this book Thunberg describes him as “the future that has already come”. 

Wong’s story is not unlike Thunberg’s to the extent that a stubborn school-based protest that might have once been confined to the human-interest pages of the local newspaper quickly became first a national and then a global concern.
This book is a memoir of an extraordinary decade in which Wong went from a nerdy obsession with Marvel comics to a Netflix documentary in which he was characterised as a superhero for democracy. It is also a call to arms to that generation that has known nothing but Instagram and Snapchat – a manifesto to “follow news sites for warning signs of political polarisation”, to use “fact-checking media”, to get out from behind their screens “to attend rallies and help organise election campaigns” and to remember, above all, any effort to preserve democracy “starts with one voice, one flyer and one speech”.
Wong half-believes he was born to the role. 

His Christian parents, who married in the weeks after the Tiananmen Square massacre named him Joshua after the Old Testament hero of Jericho, bringing down walls with his trumpet solo. 

His mother recalls him babbling like an orator from birth, and dyslexia meant that he learned to be a speechmaker to prove his intelligence. 

His first protest movement was for an improvement in school dinners at the United Christian College in Hong Kong. 

He graduated quickly to organising against a new national curriculum, announced by the island’s government.

Joshua Wong at a US congressional hearing on China in September 2019.

Wong was part of the first school year to have been born after Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. 

The new curriculum, with its insistence on a “recognition of identity”, came with a manual that praised the Chinese Communist party as “an advanced and selfless regime” and argued that “toxic bipartisan politics” in the west led to the “suffering of its people”. 

Wong and his best mate, Ivan Lam, created a Facebook page outlining resistance to the curriculum and set up street stalls and staged small-scale sit-ins to channel protest.
By 2012, a tight group of friends had grown to 10,000 Scholarism followers; Wong spent nearly every evening after school giving soapbox speeches and press interviews. 

In July that year, he led a mass protest of 100,000 people and by August – just before a new term started – his activists occupied the Admiralty Square outside the government headquarters; Ivan Lam went on hunger strike. 

By day nine of the occupation, the government chief executive, CY Leung, withdrew the plans for the “brainwashing curriculum”.

That success was only the beginning for Wong. 

The next battle was over the government’s flaky commitment to the people’s right freely to elect its chief executive. 

Beijing’s backtracking on that promise in 2017 forced the Scholarism activists back out onto the streets. 

Admiralty Square had been fenced off, but in a rallying speech Wong called for supporters to scale the barrier. 

He was pulled down from the top of the fence by riot police. 

It was only when he was released on bail after 48 hours in solitary confinement that he got to see the news footage of the demonstration. 

The following day 200,000 protesters had descended on the square; when the police fired teargas into the crowd, many of the protesters had defended themselves with umbrellas – and a new movement had been born.
Ever since, Wong has been in and out of jail while the authorities have tried and failed to subdue the ongoing protests. 

Much of the second half of this book, which is sometimes written with the flattened tone of a court report or legal document, consists of Wong’s letters from prison, trying to keep up with events on the outside, while characteristically taking up causes on the inside, including a campaign to outlaw the prison practice of shaving inmates’ hair.
On his release Wong sought to use his platform to argue that what began as Hong Kong’s student protest is increasingly all of our concern. 

Hong Kong is in many ways the test case, his book insists, not just for China to try its authoritarian muscle but also as part of a “much broader threat to global democracy”. 

In May 2019 Wong returned to prison for seven weeks for violating a court injunction involving the umbrella movement, nearly 6,000 of whose number had by then been arrested. 

His greatest regret, he joked at the time, was that he would miss the latest Marvel Avengers film. Wong had watched its predecessor many times – and seen in its subtitle a lesson for superheroes, however modest, however young, the world over. 

“The ‘infinity war’ that has ravaged Hong Kong for years, I’m afraid, may be soon coming to a political theatre near you…”

• Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act Now by Joshua Wong is published by Penguin (£9.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837

The Infamous Date That Looms Over the Hong Kong Protests

The demonstrations have parallels to the Tiananmen Square protests, but the legacy of another event on June 4, 1989, could shape Hong Kong’s future.

By JEFFREY WASSERSTROM
Riot police prepare to throw tear gas at protesters in Hong Kong.

The Beijing massacre was not the only important thing that happened in the world on June 4, 1989.
To be sure, the news dominated the front page of the following day’s edition of The New York Times—“Beijing Death Toll at Least 300” ran across the top, accompanied by a photograph of bloodied bodies and crushed bicycles. 

Below that image, however, was a story bearing the headline “Big Solidarity Victory Seen in Poland,” illustrated with a photograph of Lech Wałęsa, the dock worker turned political prisoner who against all odds was about to ascend to national power. 

Oh, and Iran had named a new supreme religious leader.
As eventful as that early June was, for most members of the crowd I joined at Hong Kong’s Victoria Park this month for a candlelight vigil to honor the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen, only one thing that happened in late spring of 1989 seemed important. 

The iconic Tank Man image seemed to be everywhere, on T-shirts and banners, and even turned into commemorative figurines.
Yet in spite of the powerful place Tiananmen holds in the imaginations of many Hong Kong residents, I am convinced that local activists would do well to keep in mind another thing that happened on June 4, 1989. 

At a time when a dramatic struggle over the city’s future is under way, centering on a proposed extradition law that large numbers of Hong Kong residents fear would sound the death knell for their ability to enjoy legal protections lacking on the mainland, the Tiananmen tragedy is worth remembering. 

So, too, though, is the unlikely victory of Solidarity.
The value of drawing connections between Beijing in 1989 and Hong Kong’s recent struggles is obvious: It was a key moment of political awakening, and last weekend’s march has been described as the biggest held in Hong Kong since one staged 30 years earlier to express anger at the June 4th massacre. 

To some protest leaders in Hong Kong, such as Joshua Wong, their Umbrella Movement—the name for demonstrations that erupted in 2014—carried forward a tradition that can be traced back all the way to student rallies in 1919 and was revived in 1989.
What, then—given how much further in geography and culture Hong Kong is from Warsaw than it is from Beijing—is the point of looking back to Solidarity?
For one, there are some parallels associated with the protesters themselves. 

For example, religious beliefs and organizations did not play a central role in the Tiananmen struggle, but Wong sometimes describes his activism as rooted in his faith.

One of the most important senior figures in the Umbrella Movement was Reverend Chu Yiu-ming, and Christian organizations have played significant roles in various recent Hong Kong struggles. These things all call to mind, despite important differences, the central role the Catholic Church played in Solidarity.
Another connection has to do with targets of protest. 

The people Solidarity challenged and ultimately bested were power-holders who claimed to be serving local people but were actually beholden to, and backed by the might of, a distant capital. 

This description does not fit the leaders that the Tiananmen protesters challenged, but it does apply to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam—and in this case, the distant capital is Beijing rather than Moscow.
Looking back to Solidarity’s electoral victory is certainly a more hopeful thing to do than focusing on the time that soldiers killed civilians in Beijing. 

It is worth remembering, though, that Solidarity’s fortunes were tied to developments in the Soviet Union as well as in Poland, and that its rise went in tandem with Mikhail Gorbachev’s softening of Moscow’s line toward states operating in its shadow.
Standing in Victoria Park on June 4, holding up a candle, I felt transported by a sense of being in step with a giant crowd engaged in a collective activity. 

Adam Michnik

As I let my mind wander, though, I began thinking more about Adam Michnik, a journalist who played key roles in the Solidarity story, than about the Tank Man.
He was on my mind in part because of a conversation we had early in the 2000s, when I was teaching at Indiana University and we hosted him for a visit. 

He had just seen a documentary about Tiananmen, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, for which I had been a consultant. 

When I asked him what he thought of it, he replied: “I knew everyone in the film.” 

This was not to say that he had a lot of Chinese friends—as he watched the movie, he kept thinking of counterparts within Solidarity and felt a shock of familiarity hearing Tiananmen activists debate, just as he and his colleagues had, the relative value of different strategies for challenging authoritarian rule, some urging caution and others pushing for more radical actions. 

Would Michnik feel the same way at Hong Kong mass actions like the one I attended? 

Would he think he “knew everyone” at the scene?
Many of the protest leaders in Hong Kong have similarities with Michnik. 

As Nina Witoszek relates in her book The Origins of Anti-Authoritarianism, Michnik began his career as an activist by forming a study society at the tender age of 15. 

Wong, who was similarly in his mid-teens in 2012 when he helped lead a successful drive to block the Hong Kong government from bringing mainland-style patriotic education into the territory, was, Witoszek concluded, a “living alter ego” of Michnik—each had even fallen afoul of a Communist Party and spent time behind bars as a prisoner of conscience. (Wong was, in fact, serving his second stint in jail at the time of the recent Victoria Park vigil.)
There are other, perhaps even more apt, successors to Michnik in the city, such as the singer turned activist Denise Ho. 

Wong is still only 21, while Michnik was in his late 30s when he wrote his book Letters From Prison and Other Essays. 

Ho, now in her early 40s, has long been vocal on LGBTQ issues and began taking daring political stances on democracy five years ago. 

She saw her songs banned from all mainland streaming services and lost all chances to tour Chinese cities, and a subsidiary of the French cosmetics firm L’Oréal canceled a concert featuring her. 

More recently, she has been playing a prominent role in the fight against the extradition law, speaking at protests, giving interviews, and publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post. 

Many of her phrases bring Michnik to mind. 

While Solidarity was in the opposition, he was known for, among other things, calling for Poles to remain open to as wide a range of tactics of struggle as possible and not be too quick to assume that setbacks are failures from which there can be no return. 

Ho has struck all the same chords. 

Michnik’s writings, like Ho’s speeches, convey a passion for a beloved community and an admiration for the people struggling to protect it, flawed as their actions sometimes are, that are so poignant as to be heartrending.
Among the items I picked up on my last visit to Hong Kong was Unfree Speech, Wong’s writings during an earlier period of incarceration. 

It was not easy to find—more and more bookstores have fallen under the control of pro-Beijing companies, and even some of those that have not are wary about stocking titles that directly criticize the local political status quo and the Chinese Communist Party. 

It is a beautiful object to behold, with an elegantly designed cover that can be manipulated by hand to show the author’s face behind bars and then free, as well as some facsimile pages inside showing prison diary entries in his own hand.
I will treasure this copy of Unfree Speech, but it is not the only souvenir of the trip that means a lot to me. 

Even more precious is something my friend Jeffrey Ngo, who often co-writes op-eds with Wong, gave me on the afternoon of June 6, right after visiting his co-author in prison: the only Tank Man figurine left among those that the opposition group he and Wong belong to had brought to their booth near Victoria Park, the rest sold to help fundraise for their organization.
I can’t help but wonder, when I look at this pair of objects on my desk right now, whether Wong will ever, as Michnik did in the 1990s, be able to write an upbeat follow-up to his book. 

The Polish intellectual’s sequel was called Letters From Freedom, with the third word in the title referring to not just his being out of jail but his country being liberated from Communist Party rule.
The figurine of the Tank Man is a reminder of how hard it is to imagine the time coming when Wong will be able to write a comparable book, presumably titled Free Speech, in an era when not only is he personally at liberty but he feels sanguine about the state of the community he loves. 

Thirty years on from the June 4th massacre, after all, the People’s Republic of China remains under one-party rule and Tiananmen and the Tank Man are still taboo topics in all parts of the country, save Hong Kong and the former Portuguese colony of Macau. 

Beyond this, the shadow Beijing casts is lengthening rather than lightening under a leader more bent on controlling all under his domain than China has seen in decades.
And yet, one thing that the histories of Poland and Hong Kong alike remind us is that completely unexpected things can happen. 

Not so long ago, one conventional wisdom about Hong Kong was that its people did not care deeply about politics, yet the city has been the site of extraordinary bursts of activism. 

In the wake of Poland’s June 4th, it seemed likely that Wałęsa would be remembered as a great national hero, but the 30th anniversary of that event finds him a contested figure. 

Right-wing populists are in charge in Warsaw and, though in some cases they began their own political careers with Solidarity, they view him with disdain. 

His reputation has also suffered since 1989 even among those with no time for the populists.
Equally or even more unexpected is how quickly things changed in Poland and other parts of the Soviet bloc after Letters From Prison was published in the mid-1980s. 

In a glowing review of the book that ran in The New York Times on October 9, 1986, Walter Goodman refers to the centenary of the Statue of Liberty being marked in the United States that year, while “the nations of Eastern and Central Europe have been ending their fourth decade under Soviet control.” 

He doubted that the people of those Communist Party–controlled lands would “have much to celebrate” when the “semicentennial” of the Cold War’s start arrived in 1996. 

But just three years later, the Berlin Wall fell.
Only a fool would predict a happy ending to the Hong Kong story, but it is also foolish to assume that history will follow a predictable course. 

And just as Michnik’s most famous statement in Letters From Prison was that Poles should practice acting “as if they were free” even while living in an unfree land, there is much to be said for the people of Hong Kong now acting, despite all the logical reasons to feel hopeless, as if there is hope.
As I watch the inspiring images coming out of the city right now, that seems to be just what they are doing.