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A Guest Post by Andrew Duncan, co-founder of the RT Weatherman Foundation and producer of Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.
I met Joshua Wong in 2014, when he was a teenager. He was no ordinary teenager. He became one of the great student organisers of our time, and I was lucky enough to help tell his story on film. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower premiered at Sundance in 2017 and won the Audience Award. Joshua sat beside me at the premiere. The next day, Netflix signed it.
That film ended in 2016, on something close to a happy ending. The new film – which you can watch via the Byline Times Podcast below – shows what happened next.
I screened it for the first time on 13 October, Joshua’s 30th birthday, in a committee room in the Houses of Parliament. Joshua spent that day in a cell in Hong Kong. He is already serving almost five years for subversion. In September, he appeared in court in Hong Kong in a second national security case, and he is still waiting to be sentenced. He could face life. What did he do? He travelled to Washington, Berlin and London and asked parliaments to help hold Beijing to its word. That is the case against him.
That word was given to Britain. In 1984, London and Beijing signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration and registered it at the United Nations. It promised Hong Kong “one country, two systems” for fifty years, until 2047. In 1997, the then Prince Charles stood in Hong Kong as Britain handed the city over on those terms. That promise has been torn up. In 2020, Beijing imposed a National Security Law on Hong Kong. It has used that law, and other charges, against some of the finest people the city has produced: Cardinal Zen, Martin Lee, Benny Tai, Jimmy Lai, and Joshua. Even the original film isn’t safe. After it climbed back to the top of Netflix in Hong Kong this year, the city’s Security Bureau began looking at whether it can be taken down.
The week of the screening of the new film, a senior official in London declined to meet me. The reason given was that this is “not a national security issue.” I find that hard to accept. A young man born in British Hong Kong is in prison for asking China to honour a treaty with Britain. If Beijing can break that agreement without cost, why would it keep any other? Think about trade. Think about the technology in British homes and cars. Think about transnational repression on British streets. A promise broken without cost is an invitation to break the next one.
My team works in Ukraine, bringing home British wounded and British dead from a war kept going with Beijing’s money. Joshua is a rescue we cannot carry out. This one needs Britain. On 2 September, Sir Iain Duncan Smith raised Joshua’s case in the House of Commons. The Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, replied: “I absolutely will take up that case.” Seven weeks on, we don’t know whether he has, or what Beijing said if he did.
I keep hearing that Britain must tread carefully on China’s new embassy in London because of building work on Britain’s embassy in Beijing. In Liverpool last month, I heard Andy Burnham speak about British values, and I believed him. I don’t believe that the Prime Minister would put renovations ahead of a British promise. Britain has leverage, and it should use it. The release of Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai and Hong Kong’s other political prisoners should be a condition of the relationship with Beijing: the embassy decision, market access, all of it. Nor is cost an excuse. If they are released, the RT Weatherman Foundation will pay for their travel and resettlement here in full, at no cost to the British taxpayer.
So please watch the film. Then do one thing: write to your MP and ask them to put a single question to the Foreign Secretary. Has Joshua Wong’s name been raised with Beijing, and what was the answer? I made this film as a birthday present for my friend. The best present Britain could give him is to keep its word.
Andrew Duncan is co-founder of the RT Weatherman Foundation and producer of Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.
Watch Andrew in conversation with Adrian Goldberg on the Byline Times podcast, followed by his video update about Joshua Wong here.