Five Hong Kongers were sentenced to 19 months in prison on Saturday (September 10) for publishing children’s books depicting local pro-democracy supporters as sheep defending their village against wolves supposedly representing Beijing.
They had been found guilty of “sedition” on Wednesday, under a law inherited from British colonization and used by current authorities to stifle dissent alongside the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.
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Lai Man-ling, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan and Fong Tsz-ho, all founding members of the speech therapists union behind the books, were kept in prison for more than a year before the trial. The books were published in 2020, just a year after huge, often violent protests by the pro-democracy movement.
No regrets
On Saturday, facing Judge Kwok Wai-kin, who once again called these posts “brainwashing exercisethree of the five members said they had no regrets.
Melody Yeung, 28, even assured that she still hoped to be on the side of the sheep. “My only regret is that I couldn’t publish more books before I was arrested.“, she said in court. Sidney Ng, 27, said via his lawyer that these lawsuits “had (the) effect of intimidating civil society and alienating Hong Kongers from each other“.
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Prosecutors had argued that the picture books exhibited a “anti-Chinese sentimentand aimed to “incite readers’ hatred towards mainland Chinese authorities“.