Joshua Wong Pleaded Guilty to Colluding With Foreign Forces. He Is Already Serving Four Years and Eight Months.

Joshua Wong, the most internationally recognizable figure to emerge from Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security. It is his second conviction under the security law Beijing imposed on the territory in 2020, and he entered it while already serving a sentence handed down under the first.

Prosecutors accused Wong of building what they called an "international front" after the 2019 protests — a sustained lobbying campaign to persuade foreign governments to punish Hong Kong and Chinese officials. The specific conduct alleged includes pressing the United States to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in 2019, which Congress approved that November, and urging other Western governments to adopt Magnitsky-style sanctions regimes aimed at officials accused of rights abuses.

The offense carries three to 10 years in prison. If a court finds the case is "of a grave nature," the maximum is life. Wong is expected to be sentenced at a later date.

He is already four years into a term of four years and eight months, imposed after he pleaded guilty in the mass prosecution of 47 activists and former lawmakers over an unofficial primary election held in 2020. Prosecutors in that case argued the primary was a scheme to win a legislative majority and paralyze the government by voting down budgets — conduct the defendants said was ordinary opposition politics under the Basic Law.

Wong has been a public figure in Hong Kong since he was a teenager. He co-founded the student group Scholarism at 15 and helped force the withdrawal of a proposed patriotic education curriculum in 2012. Two years later he became one of the faces of the Umbrella Movement, the 79-day occupation of central Hong Kong streets that demanded open nomination for the territory's chief executive. He has been in and out of custody, and out of and back into court, more or less continuously since.

Since the security law took effect, Hong Kong authorities have prosecuted hundreds of people under it, disbanded the territory's largest civil society organizations and independent unions, shuttered the newspapers most associated with the opposition, and issued arrest warrants and bounties for activists living abroad. The government maintains the law restored stability after the 2019 unrest and applies only to a small number of serious offenders. The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union have each said the prosecutions of Wong and the 47 breach the Sino-British Joint Declaration.