Hong Kong court sentences dozens in case that crushed pro-democracy camp

HONG KONG—Four years ago, a college professor in Hong Kong crafted a plan for the Chinese territory’s pro-democracy opposition to win control of the local legislature, then trigger a confrontation with Beijing by forcing the central government’s handpicked Hong Kong leader to step down.

What the opposition viewed as a political maneuver authorized by Hong Kong’s constitution, China’s Communist Party leadership saw as a criminal scheme to subvert the government. In January 2021, local authorities arrested dozens of prominent politicians and activists, later charging 47 of them with subversion under a tough national-security law imposed on Hong Kong the previous year.

On Tuesday the scholar who conceived of the electoral plan, Benny Tai, was sentenced to a 10 years in prison.

Joshua Wong, who as a teenager was a leader of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests, was sentenced to four years and eight months. Claudia Mo, a former journalist and longtime legislator, was given four years and two months, one of the shortest sentences. Sentences for the remaining defendants ranged from just over four years to more than seven years.

The trial displayed just how firmly Beijing has cemented its control of Hong Kong, a former British colony that was returned to China in 1997. While the territory was once a hotbed of dissent, the mass protests that once filled the streets have disappeared. The legislative council, which once had a vocal pro-democracy faction, now has no opposition.

“This is the trial that put all the opposition, pro-democracy leaders in jail,” said Eric Yan-Ho Lai, a research fellow at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law. “It’s unprecedented, because before 2020, Beijing had long been tolerant of political dissent in Hong Kong for decades.”

The crackdown continues. Hong Kong passed its own separate security law in March that expanded the scope of what are considered state secrets and included tough punishments for treason and espionage.

The long-running national-security trial of Jimmy Lai, the publisher who founded the pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper and financially backed the pro-democracy movement, is scheduled to resume on Wednesday, with Lai expected to testify in his own defense.

Tai, a former associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, had long been a strategist for the opposition camp. He helped conceive of the plan for mass sit-ins that led to the 2014 Umbrella Movement, when activists occupied key streets in Hong Kong for 79 days to protest limits on local elections.

“Benny Tai is a legend to the pro-democracy movement,” said Eric Yan-Ho Lai, the research fellow.

In April 2019, Tai was sentenced to 16 months in prison for his role in helping inspire the 2014 protests. After mass demonstrations engulfed Hong Kong in 2019, he helped plan a strategy for what the pro-democracy camp would do next.

Tai saw his plan as a way to force a confrontation with Beijing.

“Instead of being forced by those in power to kneel down on the edge of the cliff and beg for mercy, it is better to fight back, pull him off the cliff to see which one can still escape death,” he wrote in a Facebook post outlining his plan.

The first step was to win control of Hong Kong’s legislative council.

It was a difficult prospect, with just over half the seats directly elected and the remainder allotted to industries and other interest groups that tended to align with Beijing. But the opposition had won a landslide victory in district council elections during the 2019 protests, and aspired to more.

They began by organizing an informal primary to choose the most popular candidates for a coming election. More than 600,000 of Hong Kong’s 4.5 million registered voters participated in the July 2020 primary, despite warnings from Beijing and the local government that the exercise could be illegal under the national-security law that had recently been imposed on the city.

Tai was the target of particular criticism, with Beijing’s representative office in the city accusing him of planning to foment a “color revolution” in Hong Kong.

The primary voters chose candidates who strongly identified with the 2019 protests and sought to bring that resistance into the government. The authorities later postponed the 2020 general election, citing the pandemic. Before the vote was finally held more than a year later, Beijing changed the rules to bar opposition candidates. Many prominent members of that camp were already in prison or had fled overseas.

Tai and 30 others pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit subversion, while the remaining 16 defendants continued to trial. In May, a three-judge panel found 14 defendants guilty and acquitted two. The judges ruled that if the defendants’ plan was carried to fruition it “would create a constitutional crisis for Hong Kong.”

During sentencing hearings, Tai’s lawyers argued that he stepped away from a leadership role after the national-security law came into effect. Under the law, a person considered a principal offender faces a prison term ranging from 10 years to life, while the sentence for a participant ranges from three to 10 years.

The judges rejected Tai’s argument that he didn’t have a leading role, calling him the “mastermind” of the plan.

Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com