Hong Kong Convicts Two Leaders Who Organised Tiananmen Square Memorials
A Hong Kong court on 21 August 2026 found two former leaders of a group that held yearly memorials for the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown guilty of a national security crime. Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, were convicted of "incitement to subversion," which means they were accused of encouraging others to try to undermine the authority of the Chinese state. The verdict, delivered at the West Kowloon Magistrates' Courts, carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. Sentencing is expected on a later date The Guardian.
The two were leaders of the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance, an organisation that for decades held annual candlelight vigils in Victoria Park to remember the victims of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. In 1989, the Chinese government sent troops to violently clear protesters from Tiananmen Square in Beijing, killing hundreds or more. Hong Kong and Macau had been the only places on Chinese soil where people could publicly mourn those events.
Lee, the former chairman of the Alliance, and Chow pleaded not guilty. Their trial began on 22 January 2026 at the High Court after several delays and lasted 24 days. A third defendant, 74-year-old former lawmaker Albert Ho, pleaded guilty in January 2026. All three were charged in 2021 and have been held in custody since then.
The proceedings were not without procedural contest. On 3 November 2025, Hong Kong's High Court rejected an application by Chow to terminate the subversion trial, clearing the path for the trial to start the following January Reuters. The case moved from that failed attempt to dismiss it, to a full trial, and finally to conviction in about nine months.
Public commemoration of the Tiananmen crackdown has been effectively banned in Hong Kong since Beijing imposed a national security law on the territory in 2020. The Alliance disbanded under mounting pressure during that same period, and its assets were targeted under national security procedures. The convictions of Lee and Chow close one of the remaining high-profile legal threads tied to the group's activities.
The broader context here is the systematic closure of civic and political space in Hong Kong under the national security law, a pattern that extends well beyond the Alliance's case. The 2020 law makes it a crime to commit acts of secession (trying to break away from China), subversion, terrorism, or collusion with foreign forces. Its provisions allow for prosecution of speech and organisational activity that might previously have been protected as free expression. The law also changed how courts handle these cases: certain judges are designated for security trials, and normal rules around bail and jury trials have been shifted.
The Alliance's vigils drew tens of thousands of participants at their height and were for years a defining feature of Hong Kong's distinct political culture within China. Their prohibition, now reinforced by criminal convictions of the organisers, marks the effective end of legal public commemoration of 1989 on Chinese soil. The last vigil took place in 2019; by 2020, police cited public-health grounds and security concerns to deny permission, and no authorised gatherings have taken place since.
What may come next is the sentencing phase, where the court will determine the specific prison term within the ten-year maximum. National security cases in Hong Kong have produced sentences ranging from months to years depending on the judge's assessment of severity, role, and culpability. Lee and Chow's sentences, when delivered, will further shape the sentencing guidelines for subversion-related offences under the post-2020 framework. These guidelines are still relatively new and continue to set expectations for the dozens of national security cases still working through the court system.
For those tracking Hong Kong's judicial transformation, the verdict reinforces several already visible trends: subversion charges are being applied to organisational and expressive conduct, designated national security judges are willing to convict on incitement theories that link public advocacy to subversive intent, and the memory of 1989 has become not merely unwelcome but criminalised when expressed collectively.
