In early November, Wall Street’s big guns will head to Hong Kong for a global financial summit, dining at the Palace Museum (featuring Chinese imperial works on loan from Beijing) before meeting at the nearby Rosewood Hotel — one of the city’s swankiest. There, the top brass from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and another 100 financial firms will enjoy delicious food and breathtaking views as Hong Kong’s leaders pitch them on the profits to be made in the former British colony.
The same day as the gala dinner, a very different type of gathering will take place in Hong Kong. The veteran political activist Chow Hang-tung will try to quash national security proceedings against her. She is scheduled to stand trial in January, along with Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho, for their role in organizing annual commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre — an event that drew hundreds of thousands of people every June 4 until 2019.
Chow and Lee have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and Ho is a well-known lawyer in Hong Kong. They now face 10 years in prison on subversion charges, simply for urging Hong Kongers to light candles in honor of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Chinese protesters who were killed by their own government. These were the only public commemorations of the massacre held on Chinese soil, and for three decades, they were legal.
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