Joshua Wong, born on 13 October 1996, is a Hong Kong politician and student leader. In 2011, aged just fourteen, he co-founded the student group Scholarism with schoolmates including Ivan Lam, and in 2012 he led the movement against the government's Moral and National Education curriculum, which ended with the authorities shelving the official guidelines and made him a household name. In September 2014 he led a secondary-school class boycott and demonstrators later stormed the forecourt of the government headquarters, Civic Square, helping to set off the Umbrella Movement, during which he was one of Scholarism's leading figures, helping organise class boycotts and the occupation with the Hong Kong Federation of Students and others. After the movement he dissolved Scholarism in 2016 and formed the political party Demosisto with Nathan Law and Agnes Chow, advocating Hongkongers' right to self-determination. In August 2017 he, Nathan Law and Alex Chow had their sentences for the 2014 storming of Civic Square increased by the Court of Appeal, Wong receiving six months. In 2019 he was disqualified from standing in the district council election, and during the anti-extradition movement that June he was arrested in the siege of police headquarters. In 2020 he was jailed for ten months over an unauthorised June Fourth vigil, and in December that year received more than a year for an unauthorised assembly outside police headquarters in June 2019. Demosisto dissolved on the eve of the National Security Law. On 7 January 2021, while serving his sentence, he was arrested again over an alleged breach of the National Security Law. One of the most internationally recognisable young Hong Kong activists after the Umbrella Movement, he made repeated lobbying trips abroad. On 19 November 2024 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit subversion in the Hong Kong 47 case and was jailed for four years and eight months.
Joshua Wong rose to prominence through founding Scholarism in 2011 and the anti-national-education campaign of 2012, becoming a symbolic figure of both the Umbrella Movement and the 2019 protests. His international profile brought outside attention to Hong Kong's youth activism. He was later jailed in several cases and prosecuted under the National Security Law, his cases becoming a symbol of the territory's shifting political environment.
Achievements
- 2011 · Co-founded the student group Scholarism with Ivan Lam and others
- 2012 · Led the opposition to the national education curriculum, which was shelved
- 2016 · Dissolved Scholarism and founded the party Demosisto
- 2024 · Pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit subversion in the Hong Kong 47 case and was jailed for 4 years 8 months