Hong Kong —
Two key organizers behind the event, which was mainland China’s only major public commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, have been found guilty by a Hong Kong court of inciting destruction.
The ruling is the latest chapter in a years-long crackdown by Hong Kong authorities on publicly commemorating the moment in 1989 when the ruling Chinese Communist Party deployed tanks to violently suppress a peaceful student-led democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Zhou Hangdong, a prominent young human rights lawyer who defended him, and former opposition lawmaker Lee Chok-yang were found guilty of inciting subversion in West Kowloon Court on Friday. They could face up to 10 years in prison under a national security law imposed on the city by the Chinese government in 2020.
A third activist, veteran Democratic lawmaker Albert Ho, previously pleaded guilty and will be sentenced later.
Hong Kong’s status as once part of China has been upended in recent years by a national security crackdown that followed the massive and often violent pro-democracy protests that rocked the city in 2019.
One of the most visible examples of that change is the abolition of the annual candlelight vigil at Tiananmen, where large crowds had gathered to call for full democracy in Hong Kong and an end to one-party rule in China.
Beijing and Hong Kong’s governments say the national security law was necessary to return Hong Kong to order and stability.
Critics, human rights groups and several Western countries, including the United States, say the crackdown has crushed dissent and ended Hong Kong’s unique freedoms.
“The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government strongly condemns any biased statements or defamation of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s efforts to safeguard national security,” a spokesperson for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region said in response to a CNN inquiry before the ruling, using Hong Kong’s official title, adding that rights and freedoms are protected under the National Security Law.
Those sentenced on Friday were key leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance for Supporting Chinese Patriotic Democratic Movements, the group responsible for organizing the annual memorial service until 2019.
This came just days after Chinese leader Xi Jinping praised the then-ruling Communist Party’s decision to quell the Tiananmen protests in a speech that made a rare reference to the turbulent period.
How did CNN cover the Tiananmen incident?
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese military cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators near Tiananmen Square in Beijing. No official death toll has been announced, but estimates range from hundreds to thousands, with many more injured. The subject remains widely censored within China.
After the 1989 incident, mourners gathered in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district on the same day every year to attend a vigil that filled multiple football pitches in Victoria Park with candlelight.
This was a tradition that continued after Hong Kong’s handover to Britain in 1997, along with frequent street protests and a political system that allowed pro-democracy parliamentarians to stand.
This tradition ended with the imposition of a series of new national security offenses in the wake of the 2019 protests.
During the trial, prosecutors claimed that the three-man alliance sought to end “one-party dictatorship” and incited subversion. They claimed that the call was aimed at illegally subverting China’s basic institutions and central political institutions.
Prosecutors said the alliance’s actions amounted to subversion by continuing to push for the expulsion of the Chinese Communist Party even after the national security law went into effect, adding that the alliance was also behind numerous events promoting public hatred against China, including the annual vigil.
The defense rejected any suggestion that they intended to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party, arguing that their campaign was a call for a transition to democracy and for the party not to impose a “dictatorship.” They also claimed that the alliance does not ask people to take illegal steps or promote peaceful protests.
Chow, a trial lawyer by trade, led his own defense in the case, which, like all Hong Kong national security cases, was tried not by a jury but by a panel of three judges chosen to oversee such proceedings.
“To tell the truth was to incite hatred, to seek justice was to exploit suffering, to limit power was to violate the constitution, and to return power to the people was to subvert the state,” she said during the trial, the Associated Press reported.
Mr Lee and Mr Chow have been in pre-trial detention since their arrest in late 2021, a practice common in national security arrests and difficult to obtain on bail.
Mr. Chow, Mr. Lee and Mr. Ho are prominent figures in Hong Kong’s defunct pro-democracy movement, where most of its leaders have either been imprisoned, fled abroad or remained silent.
Mr. Chow, now 41, studied science at Britain’s Cambridge University before returning to Hong Kong to advocate for workers’ rights, later joining the alliance Mr. Ho and Mr. Lee helped found.
She also sought a second career as a lawyer, inspired by the mainland Chinese workers she was asked to help, according to a previous interview with Reuters.
Mr Lee is a veteran trade unionist who has spent his career improving conditions for workers, while Mr Ho, a lawyer by trade, was a founding member of the city’s main opposition party, the Democratic Party, which dissolved in late 2025.
Chou Fengxao, a former Tiananmen student leader and now an American citizen, told CNN that the ruling shows “how profoundly Hong Kong has changed.”
“Authorities can extinguish the candles in Victoria Park, but they cannot erase the memory of June 4,” he added.
This story has been updated throughout.
