Statement: Hong Kong Convicts Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung and Criminalizes the Memory of Tiananmen

Today, a Hong Kong court convicted Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung and the Hong Kong Alliance of inciting subversion under the National Security Law.

I remember being at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong when Lee Cheuk-yan returned from Beijing on June 8, 1989.

He had gone to Beijing carrying donations from Hong Kongers to support the students in Tiananmen Square. After the crackdown, he was detained and eventually allowed to return home. I remember being there when he arrived.

I could not have known then that I was witnessing the beginning of a commitment that would define much of Lee's life. For the next three decades, he helped Hong Kong remember the people who were killed on June 4 and demanded that the Chinese government reckon with what happened.

The man I watched return from Beijing after the Tiananmen crackdown spent the next thirty years refusing to forget what he had witnessed. Now, nearly four decades later, Hong Kong has convicted him for the political commitments that grew out of that memory.

I know Lee. I know the person behind the government's allegations and today's judgment.

Lee has spent his life standing with people who had less power than he did: workers fighting for their rights, political prisoners who could not speak for themselves, the families of those killed on June 4, and generations of Hong Kongers who gathered every year simply to remember.

At his trial, Lee said that he bore no hatred toward the Communist Party, that what motivated him was love for people, and that he wanted China to become prosperous, democratic and free.

I believe him because I know him.

Lee is stubborn. He is persistent. He has an almost unreasonable faith that people and institutions can change. But he is not a threat to China. His tools have always been peaceful ones: organizing, solidarity, memory, and the belief that ordinary people should have a voice in the country they call home.

For decades, Hong Kongers lit candles in Victoria Park and remembered people their government wanted them to forget. Today, the government has gone further. It has turned keeping that memory alive into evidence of a crime against the state.

Lee and Chow have already spent nearly five years behind bars. They now face the possibility of years more.

The Chinese government could detain Lee and send him home, but it could not make him forget what he had seen.

Decades later, the Hong Kong government can convict him and put him back in prison. It still cannot make what he remembers untrue.

It cannot erase the people killed on June 4.

And it cannot make a lifetime spent peacefully fighting for workers, democracy and human dignity into something shameful.

I was there when Lee came home in 1989. I am proud to stand with him today.

Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung should be free.

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