On 4 January 2022 the Hong Kong democracy activist Chow Hang-tung was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment for writing an article in which she urged people to light candles privately to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, since they had been banned from doing so in public. She is already serving a 12-month sentence for attempting to defy the ban.
From the dock, she said: “The only way to defend freedom of speech is to continue to speak. Words have inherent vitality and can never be defined by law or authority… The dead are not a hoax, nor a conspiracy of foreign powers, but a series of lives. The real scam is to shield the murderer in the name of law, and to erase the existence of the victim in the name of the country: a country that does not even respect the deceased.”
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