A 27-year-old man named Chu Kai-pong pled guilty to “sedition” in a Hong Kong court on Monday because he wore a t-shirt with a protest slogan.
Chu is the first person to be convicted under a new “national security law” that China imposed on Hong Kong in March.
Chu’s offense was wearing a t-shirt that said, “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” — the slogan of the massive 2019 pro-democracy uprising.
Chu also wore a mask emblazoned with “FDNOL,” an acronym for another slogan from the 2019 uprising: “Five Demands, Not One Less.” The first of the Five Demands was the complete withdrawal of a controversial extradition bill that touched off the protest movement.
Chu was arrested for wearing his shirt and mask at a Mass Transit Railway (MTR) station on June 12, which is regarded as one of the most important anniversary dates for the 2019 democracy movement. The police said Chu wore his paraphernalia to remind people of the protests.
Remembering those protests is now a crime in Hong Kong. The Chinese communist regime in Beijing crushed the pro-democracy movement by imposing a tyrannical “national security law” with extralegal methods in 2020. The law criminalized everything the communists saw as a threat to their power, very much including calls for freedom and democracy.
In March 2024, Hong Kong’s legislature — once a place of vibrant debate, now a hollowed-out rubber stamp for the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda — passed a “national security law” intended to “plug” the “loopholes” in Beijing’s law. This mostly consisted of adding even more thought and speech crimes to the list China created in 2020 and toughening the penalties for violators.
The crime of “sedition” that Chu was charged with, for example, saw its maximum penalty increased from two years in prison to seven, possibly ten if prosecutors decide the defendant is also guilty of “collusion with foreign forces.” Hong Kong’s puppet government tends to portray all pro-democracy activism as inspired and directed by foreign governments, particularly the United States.
The very first trial held by Hong Kong’s puppet government under the Chinese “national security law” in 2020 established that protest slogans, like “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times,” were inherently “secessionist” and “seditious.”
Chu’s lawyer argued that the slogan on his mask, “Five Demands, Not One Less,” has not been ruled seditious, the police could not prove that any onlookers on June 12 even understood what “FDNOL” meant, and Chu was only wearing his mask and t-shirt for a grand total of 25 minutes.
Prosecutors, on the other hand, pointed to Chu’s four previous convictions, one of which netted him three months in jail for wearing the very same “Liberate Hong Kong” slogan on a t-shirt.
Chu worked out a deal to plead guilty to sedition in exchange for the court dropping other charges against him, including loitering and failing to produce identification when challenged by the police. His hearing was overseen by Victor So, a magistrate hand-picked by Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee to handle “national security law” cases.
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