On a recent Thursday, 30-year-old iconic Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong was handed a 10-year prison sentence on charges of colluding with foreign forces under the city’s sweeping 2020 National Security Law (NSL). The verdict arrives when Wong was just months away from scheduled release in January 2025, after already serving six consecutive years behind bars on prior subversion convictions. The judge ruled that only two months and two days of the newly issued 10-year term would run concurrently with Wong’s ongoing sentence, meaning he will face nearly a full additional decade of detention. The court heard that Wong, alongside exiled co-founder of their disbanded pro-democracy political party Demosisto Nathan Law, orchestrated a campaign between July and late November 2020 to lobby foreign governments to impose sanctions and blockades targeting Beijing. During the Thursday court hearing, Wong appeared dressed in a dark blue long-sleeve shirt, khaki trousers and black-rimmed glasses, noticeably slimmer than in his previous public appearances. He nodded to greet packed members of the public gallery, many of whom queued for hours to secure a seat, while a heavy police deployment was stationed outside the courthouse to maintain order. Wong had entered a guilty plea to the collusion charges back in September of this year. A prominent public face of Hong Kong’s now-suppressed pro-democracy movement, Wong’s decades-long activism traces back to his early teenage years. Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child and struggling with academic performance in his early school years, he demonstrated a willingness to challenge unfair norms from adolescence: as a secondary school student, he organized classmates via social media to protest overpriced canteen meals. At 14 in 2011, he co-founded the influential student activist group Scholarism, which led a 2012 campaign that drew over 100,000 participants to push back against the government’s proposed mandatory patriotic education curriculum in schools, forcing authorities to abandon the policy. By 2014, he emerged as a leading figure in the historic Umbrella Movement civil disobedience campaign, cementing his status as one of the most recognizable pro-democracy voices in the city. In 2016, he co-founded Demosisto alongside Nathan Law and Agnes Chow, who later also went into exile. Wong had repeatedly rejected framing himself as a top-down protest leader, emphasizing in a 2019 Financial Times interview that the movement operated on a decentralized, bottom-up model with countless unsung facilitators. When the NSL was imposed by Beijing in 2020 in the wake of large-scale pro-democracy protests that year, Demosisto immediately disbanded. While Law fled to the United Kingdom to continue advocacy overseas, Wong remained in Hong Kong and attempted to run for a legislative seat, only to be disqualified by authorities who cited his opposition to the NSL as a key grounds for the bar. His legal troubles accumulated rapidly: in November 2020, he pleaded guilty to charges tied to his participation in 2019 protests outside the Hong Kong police headquarters, and in early 2021 he was named as one of the 47 high-profile activists (later dubbed the “Hong Kong 47”) prosecuted for conspiracy to commit subversion, the largest NSL case to date, resulting in a 56-month prison term. Days before entering that 2020 guilty plea, Wong shared a public Instagram message addressed to Hong Kong residents, noting he held little faith in the city’s formal political system but unshakable confidence in its people, even as state power placed unprecedented strain on civil society resilience. The ruling against Wong has drawn sharp criticism from human rights organization Amnesty International, which argued the harsh sentence underscored authorities’ intent to detain prominent dissidents for as long as possible, out of fear of their influence. In contrast, Hong Kong officials have long defended the NSL as a critical framework to restore social stability after the 2019 unrest, repeatedly denying accusations that the legislation has eroded the city’s promised high degree of autonomy and systematically silenced political dissent. Wong’s 10-year sentence is the second-highest ever issued under the NSL, trailing only the 20-year term handed to former media mogul Jimmy Lai on parallel collusion with foreign forces charges.