Editorial | September 11, 2026
Prison sentences measure punishment. They do not measure belief.
That is why the words of the families of Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung matter. After severe sentences were imposed on former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance, their relatives did not speak only about loss. They spoke about memory, resolve and the refusal to surrender faith in truth and freedom.
This is not religious faith. It is civic faith: the belief that truth matters even when the state punishes those who defend it; that memory belongs to the people, not to political power; and that conscience does not become wrong simply because a court attaches a criminal label to it.
Why people accept the cost
For survivors and participants of the 1989 democracy movement, this question is deeply familiar. Why does someone continue when the personal cost is obvious? Why preserve a memory when silence would be safer? Why defend principles that may cost years of freedom?
The answer is rarely that sacrifice itself is desirable. It is that some values become impossible to abandon without abandoning part of oneself.
The June 4 vigils represented precisely that kind of choice. For decades, Hong Kong citizens gathered publicly to remember people they did not personally know and an event the authorities in mainland China sought to remove from public life. The act of remembrance became an expression of responsibility across generations.
Free China Movement stands with the defendants and their families, and with Chinese citizens of conscience everywhere who continue to place truth, dignity and freedom above personal convenience or safety.
A court can determine a sentence. It cannot determine what a people are permitted to remember in their hearts.
Conscience and unjust law
The deeper issue is the same one explored in FCM’s long-form essay, When the Law Punishes Conscience: Why Justice Can Stand Above Unjust Law.
Hong Kong’s families have given that argument a human face. Their response asks us to consider not only what the law can punish, but what conviction can survive.
Freedom endures when people continue to believe that truth is worth carrying forward, even when carrying it becomes costly.