Joshua Wong, heir to the Cold War dissidents

I met Joshua Wong in 2013. I thought him unlike anyone I had ever met – or would ever meet. Joshua was just 16 and it would be another year before the Umbrella Movement made his name globally recognised. TIME had not yet called him the ‘voice of a generation’ in a cover story. But he was famous in Hong Kong. In 2011, he helped found and lead a political organisation. In 2012, this group spearheaded a drive to get the local government to shelve its plan to bring mainland-style patriotic education into Hong Kong. Amazingly, they won.

How did I meet Joshua? My friend Ming Chan, a fellow historian, found out I was coming to Hong Kong and emailed to say he knew someone I needed to see: ‘the super kid Josh of the HK student movement (“anti-brainwash”)’. Ming failed to note he had an agenda. He hoped that, as someone teaching in California, I could convince this ‘super kid’ to attend college there. He worried that if Joshua stayed in Hong Kong the authorities would make life hard for him. I did what Ming asked and extolled California schools to Joshua. He was polite but a bit cold, making it clear he was too attached to Hong Kong and the cause of protecting what set it apart from mainland cities to spend extended time abroad.

I got a second chance to talk to him in 2016. We had a better interaction. He had been prosecuted for acts of civil disobedience, so we talked about that, about his central role in the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, and about the political party he and friends had just co-founded.

We next met late in 2018. Since our previous chat, he had turned 21 in prison and helped a member of his group’s political party secure a legislative seat, only to see this young winning candidate disqualified for allegedly showing disrespect when taking the oath of office. Understandably, he seemed dispirited but made it clear he remained determined to keep fighting.

Eight months later, I was back in Hong Kong and wanted to talk to him since I’d begun writing a book about the city’s protests. Alas, he was back in prison.

I reflected a lot on my three conversations with Joshua during 2020, the year darkness fell on the city. I wasn’t sure whether I would ever see Joshua again. I’m still not sure. What I was certain of at the time was that I’d never meet anyone like him again. I was wrong.

The Thai activist Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal has a lot in common with Joshua. They are the same age: Netiwit was born in September and Joshua in October 1996. Like Joshua, Netiwit was politically precocious. He began organising fellow students and staging protests in secondary school. Reading about Joshua, Netiwit told friends that he felt a kinship with him. The two even look alike. Both were ‘nerdy guys with glasses’. Netiwit was never globally famous, but he was also celebrated in TIME in ‘Meet the Face of Resistance to Thailand’s Junta’, a 2017 profile of him.

By the time that story appeared, he and Joshua were friends. After the Umbrella Movement, Netiwit tried to make contact with the Hong Kong activist online. Joshua didn’t respond, but a trait Netiwit shares with Joshua is dogged determination. In 2016, he flew to Hong Kong, went to a rally he knew Joshua would attend, and introduced himself. During a long conversation Netiwit convinced Joshua that they were kindred spirits, united by longing to improve a place they loved and by a dislike of the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP was both transforming Hong Kong into a mainland city and supporting Thailand’s junta.

I’ve been fascinated by the ways Netiwit and Joshua found to support each other’s efforts. Here are two examples. In 2019 the largest-ever wave of Hong Kong protests began. Netiwit took part in a demonstration outside the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok denouncing Beijing’s human rights record. Late in 2020, when Netiwit’s city was the site of enormous protests, Joshua stood outside Hong Kong’s Thai consulate to decry police brutality in Bangkok.

That action turned out to be Joshua’s last public one. Before 2020 ended, he was arrested on trumped-up charges. He started a long stretch, still underway, as a political prisoner, sentenced first for one alleged crime and then for another just before he was due to be released. As I write early in October 2026, he has spent more than half a decade straight in jail. He will be given a new sentence any day.

Joshua also has a lot in common with Adam Michnik, a journalist and activist in the former Soviet bloc linked to the Solidarity movement. I met Adam at a 1999 Budapest conference held to celebrate those who were part of the 1968 generation. He spoke to me about Poland and I spoke about China, as part of a joint decade-on assessment of the epochal events of 1989.

How are they alike? Adam began participating in organisations and stirring things up at a young age. He was arrested before turning 20. He will turn 80 as a free man on the 17th of this month, four days after Joshua turns 30 in prison. When young, Adam, too, spent some birthdays imprisoned by authorities who took their cues from Moscow, much as those in Joshua’s city take their cues from Beijing. For both men, patriotism and political ideals go together. After Adam was arrested during the 1981 crackdown that curtailed Solidarity’s initial rise, he was told he could leave prison, but only if he left Poland. He said no. In Joshua’s case, in a 2024 court appearance, his first chance in years to make any kind of public statement, he shouted out three words: ‘I love Hong Kong.’

Another parallel relates to friendships. Activists across the Soviet bloc shared the same goals, just as some in different parts of Asia do now. So, I told my Hungarian friend, the leading Soviet dissident Miklós Haraszti, the story of Netiwit and Joshua’s friendship and asked if it reminded him of anything. Miklós told me that Netiwit’s trip to Hong Kong sounded a lot like one he took to Poland in the 1970s. He had read Adam’s work while in Budapest and, finding it inspiring, set out for Poland expressly to meet him. The result was an enduring friendship.

As with Netiwit and Joshua, Miklós noted, his connection to Adam laid the groundwork for significant collaborations, such as the friendship between Adam and Václav Havel. When activists in one country were persecuted, friends in others gathered signatures for letters of support.

Thinking about all this gives new meaning to the moving letters Michnik wrote in the early 1980s, while Poland was under martial law. These letters, translated by Maya Latynski for inclusion in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (University of California Press, 1985), refer to the need to treasure memories of camaraderie and bravery, even if they happened during movements that failed, and find ways to keep despair at bay in dark times.

I wish I could imagine this book getting into Joshua’s hands, so he could read in his thirties what Adam wrote in his. I find it impossible, though, to envision the book reaching him the way things are.

And yet, thinking about the Soviet bloc when considering depressing and repressive situations reminds us that unexpected developments sometimes happen. A Cold War-era reviewer of Adam’s book noted that the 40th anniversary of the start of Communist Party rule had passed in various parts of Europe in 1985, and that for most people in those countries this had been no cause for celebration. Writing in 1986, he claimed there was every reason to think the same would be true in 1995. He was wrong. Unexpected changes occurred. By 1995, a Czech friend of Adam’s had even gone from being known for writing plays to becoming president.