On 5 November 2026, the Hong Kong High Court sentenced Joshua Wong Chi-Fung to a 10-year prison term for colluding with foreign forces under the city’s national security law. The prosecution accused Wong of conspiring with political exile Nathan Law to call on foreign governments to impose sanctions on Hong Kong while advocating political self-determination.
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Joshua Wong began his activism as a school boy when he founded Scholarism, a student-group aimed at opposing the then mandatory national and moral education curriculum to be implemented in Hong Kong schools from the 2012-13 school year. Students laid claim to “civic square” and ultimately forced the government to abandon the compulsory curriculum, which was widely seen as brainwashing Hong Kong youth and glorifying the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 2014, he organised a class boycott in protest of the CCP’s White Paper, and, subsequently, its decision paper setting out a proposed framework of democratic reforms. The decision set out that 2-3 candidates would be “selected” by a pro-Beijing committee for election to the office of Chief Executive.
I have previously highlighted that this framework was widely regarded as “fake democracy”, leading to the 79-day Umbrella Movement demanding genuine universal suffrage. Hong Kong’s legislature ultimately rejected the Beijing package in 2015. In response, Wong, along with Agnes Chow and Nathan Law, set up Demosistō, a political party that called for self-determination of Hong Kong at the expiry of “one country, two systems” in 2047. Wong was not old enough to run at the time, so Nathan Law was elected representing the Hong Kong Island constituency. Law was the youngest elected legislator in Hong Kong’s history. In 2017, Beijing decided to silence Law, who was disqualified for his insincere oath. Since his disqualification, any open discussion of self-determination became increasingly difficult to sustain in Hong Kong. During the leaderless 2019 Hong Kong protests, Wong, along with other student leaders, went to the United States to ask its congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. In 2020, he participated in the unofficial primaries. He is concurrently serving a sentence for subversion.
This article explains the concept of self-determination, discusses why this principle is so threatening to the CCP, and concludes with possible ways in which Hong Kong can exercise self-determination in exile.
In the post-war era, most of the colonised world were preparing for decolonisation under the UN’s decolonisation principles. According to the UN Charter, all peoples have the right to self-determination. In 1960, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 1541, which defines self-determination as a people’s independence, association with an independent state, or integration with an independent state. The UN Resolution did not provide an option of remaining with the empire, though there are still fourteen remaining British territories around the world today.
But in 1972, China requested that Hong Kong and Macau be removed from the list of non-self-governing territories, claiming that these were not ordinary colonies but occupied territories. Through Resolution 2908 (XXVII) (section 3), the General Assembly approved the Special Committee’s report. Since then, Hong Kong people were no longer a people eligible for UN decolonisation. Joshua Wong’s argument is that Resolution 2908 (XXVII) obscured the Special Committee’s report, and representatives of member states were generally unaware of the Hong Kong and Macau issue contained in the report when they voted. While these member states voted for the liberation of colonised peoples in principle, it was not a vote specifically on China’s request to remove the two territories from the UN decolonisation framework. He argues that this was a historical mistake, and that China has distorted the truth today when it implies that these member states were opposed to Hong Kong self-determination.
The UK and China began negotiations a decade later in 1982, and came up with a compromise, commonly known as “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong”. This formulation underpinned the Sino-British Joint Declaration, co-signed by both sovereign states in 1984, setting out an agreement on how China should govern Hong Kong for fifty years following the handover. The treaty states that the Chief Executive and the Legislature will both be popularly elected. The Joint Declaration also states that Hong Kong will be given a high-degree of autonomy to be governed as an autonomous entity for fifty years, except for matters of defence and foreign affairs.
Under Xi Jinping’s government, however, the 2014 White Paper claimed “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong. As I argued elsewhere, this was a significant repudiation of the principle “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong” previously agreed with Britain. The White Paper described some Hong Kong people’s understanding of the constitutional arrangement as “confused or lopsided”. This description thus inverted the narrative, deflecting the issue from the Chinese state’s misrepresentation of the agreement to the misunderstanding of it among Hong Kong people.
There are thus two types of self-determination. One is external, where a population determines its political status under the 1960 resolution. Another is internal, where a people exercises political self-determination within an existing state, through meaningful political participation, representative government, and autonomy.
Following Beijing’s claim of “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong, particularly after the 2014 electoral reform decision, many localist parties were created to run for election to the legislature in response to China’s repudiation of the Joint Declaration. Among their representatives was Edward Leung, a pro-democracy candidate for Hong Kong Indigenous, who coined the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” (光復香港，時代革命).
Leung observed at the time: “Some of us realised that, well, as long as we are under Chinese rule there is no hope to realise democracy or real autonomy in Hong Kong”. His position reflected a more radical interpretation of “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong”, which questioned whether genuine political autonomy was possible under Chinese sovereignty. Some localist groups such as the Hong Kong National Party subsequently advocated Hong Kong’s independence, which was already foreclosed in the 1972 resolution.
Demosistō did not advocate immediate independence. Instead, it proposed that Hong Kong people should have the democratic right to determine their own political future, potentially through a referendum on Hong Kong’s political status beyond 2047. Although independence was not its immediate political objective, Demosistō did not exclude it as a possible outcome. The CCP, however, conflated the exercise of self-determination with an attempt to separate Hong Kong from China when it had no evidence of the proposed referendum’s likely result, even if one was held.
The fundamental challenge to the CCP was therefore not the prospect of Hong Kong’s independence, but the daring capacity of Hong Kong people to exercise critical thinking alongside the previously agreed principle that the people themselves should have the authority to decide their own political destiny within the fifty-year period. That is precisely why the CCP keeps Joshua Wong behind bars for as long as possible.
On this basis, Hong Kong’s decolonisation is incomplete. Hong Kong’s sovereignty was transferred to China without the consent of the people, who, according to a 2023 University of Liverpool study report, overwhelmingly do not identify as Chinese. In this sense, Chinese nationality was imposed upon Hong Kong people against their will under the Chinese memorandum appended to the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
My thesis provides a blueprint for a nationality-based referendum on Hong Kong’s political future while waiting for the CCP regime to be eliminated. I argue that for the first time in Hong Kong’s trajectory, the BN(O) pathway has created a potential opportunity for a UK-backed referendum to be held for Hong Kong people. Although the proposed referendum would not involve the entirety of Hong Kong’s population, this nationality-based eligibility could still represent a substantial proportion to result in a meaningful referendum. The outcome of this symbolic referendum would not change China’s distorted stance on Hong Kong’s political status, but the referendum can be conducted to honour Joshua Wong, who is being persecuted by the totalitarian party-state for speaking out against a historical injustice. In this sense, a UK-backed referendum could highlight to the international community the intensifying human rights violations China is committing not only against dissidents, but also against an entire people which has been denied its right to self-determination under its rule.
Ka Hang Wong is an English language educator and researcher with over a decade of experience teaching English for Academic Purposes and IELTS across China and Australia. He received his PhD from the University of Technology Sydney in March 2026 with a thesis tracing the historical evolution of BN(O) status from a token of British nationality into a tool of political resistance against a totalitarian party-state’s assault on Hong Kong. He has published research on Hong Kong, focusing on postcolonial linguistics, pragmatics, and English language teaching.