A Hong Kong man has been sentenced to 14 months in jail for wearing a T-shirt and a mask with protest slogans deemed “seditious”, the first person to be convicted under the city’s tough new national security law.
Chu Kai-pong, 27, was sentenced on Thursday at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts, having pleaded guilty earlier in the week to one count of “doing acts with seditious intention”, an offence carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail under the new legislation, known as Article 23.
Chu was arrested for wearing a T-shirt reading “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” and a yellow mask printed with “FDNOL” – shorthand for another pro-democracy slogan, “five demands, not one less” – on June 12, a date marking the fifth anniversary of the city’s huge pro-democracy protests in 2019.
The 2019 protest movement was the most concerted challenge to the Hong Kong government since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. It waned because of widespread arrests, the exile of democracy activists, the COVID-19 pandemic and China’s imposition of an earlier security law in 2020.
Referring to the 2019 protests, Chief Magistrate Victor So – a judge handpicked by the government to hear national security cases – said on Thursday that Chu “took advantage of a symbolic day with the intention to reignite the ideas behind the unrest”.
In January, the judge had sentenced Chu to three months in jail for wearing a similar T-shirt at the airport and possessing publications deemed seditious. He noted that Chu’s “subsequent act” showed the “deterrent effect of his previous sentence was insufficient”.
Quelling dissent
The sedition offence was created under British colonial rule, which ended in 1997, but was seldom used until Hong Kong authorities revived it in 2020 after the protests.
With the protests quashed, China imposed a national security law on the city in mid-2020 to quell further dissent.
The new national security law – the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, also known as Article 23 – came into force in March.
The revised law augments the offence of sedition to include inciting hatred against China’s communist leadership, upping its jail sentence to a maximum penalty of 10 years if the sedition is conducted in collusion with an “external force”.
Critics, including Western nations such as the United States, say Article 23 will further erode freedoms and silence dissent in Hong Kong – a finance hub once considered one of the freest territories in China.
As of this month, 303 people have been arrested under the two security laws, with 176 prosecuted and 160 convicted.
