Arguably Hong Kong’s best-known pro-democracy activist, Wong began his journey into activism when he was just 14 years old.
By 2014, he had become the face of the Umbrella movement, a mass student protest with an umbrella as a symbol that emerged alongside the Occupy Central sit-in.
He was only 20 years old when he became active put him in prisonthe first of several convictions.
Months of protests erupted in Hong Kong in 2019 as hundreds of thousands marched against a highly controversial extradition bill that would allow Hong Kongers to be sent to mainland China for trial.
In June of that year, Wong was among thousands of people who staged a 15-hour siege of police headquarters in Wan Chai district, pelting the building with eggs and spraying graffiti on its walls.
Although the demonstrations were widely seen at the time as a spontaneous “leaderless” movement, prosecutors said he led this particular protest, pointing to a video in which he called on the crowd to “completely besiege police headquarters.” .
For his participation in them, he was imprisoned and placed in a detention center.
But after pleading guilty, he remained defiant: “Maybe the authorities want me to sit one after another. But I am convinced that neither prison bars, nor the ban on elections, nor any other arbitrariness will stop us from being active.”
He was still serving his sentence when he was charged with subversion under the NSL.
On Tuesday, he received four years and eight months in prison.
