On a Friday morning in Hong Kong, a court delivered a verdict that many legal observers had long anticipated but hoped would not come. Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, a labour organiser who stood in Tiananmen Square during the final days before the tanks rolled in 1989, and Chow Hang-tung, 41, a Cambridge-educated barrister who represented herself with striking composure, were found guilty of incitement to subversion under Hong Kong's national security law. Their crime, as prosecutors framed it, was organising the candlelit vigils that had marked the anniversary of Beijing's deadly crackdown every June for more than three decades. The case was widely regarded as a test of how much room remains for political memory in a city that Beijing has reshaped with remarkable speed.

The Hong Kong Alliance, the group that both defendants led before it was dissolved under legal pressure, had held those vigils continuously since 1990 — an act of collective remembrance that was, until recently, entirely legal. A third defendant, Albert Ho, had already pleaded guilty in January. The guilty verdicts confirm what critics of the national security law, imposed in 2020 following a year of mass protests, had warned: that commemoration itself can now be treated as sedition. In her closing submissions, Chow argued that the Alliance recognised no enemies and sought only to oppose one-party rule — a distinction the court did not accept.

Lee, for his part, told the court that he had spent his life fighting for freedom of association and independent trade unions in China. Both have been held in custody since 2021.