On the morning of June 30, 2020, Joshua Wong walked into an office tower called the St. John’s Building, directly across the street from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. He carried nothing but his cellphone.
The repressive machinery of mainland China was closing in on the city where he had spent almost half of his young life fighting for democracy, and though for six years he had curated an image as a fearless international icon, that morning, Wong felt panicked. He had decided to take his chances by appealing to the conscience of the most powerful democracy in the world.
Wong was a skinny, toothy teen in 2014, when his student activism in the Umbrella Movement catapulted him to global renown: Time magazine dubbed him “The Face of Protest.” He served a short prison sentence and was released in June 2019, into the tear-gas-tinged humidity of Hong Kong’s summer of discontent. Again he took the democracy movement’s cause to the press, becoming its international advocate, urging European powers to take a harder line on Beijing and calling for Washington to impose sanctions against those who throttled Hong Kong’s freedoms.
But in the summer of 2020, with the world in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Chinese officials put the final touches on a national-security law that effectively criminalized dissent and reengineered the very character of a once freewheeling city. Those found guilty under its provisions could be sentenced to prison for life.
Now Hong Kong’s political groups and civil-society organizations were preparing to disband. Shops were pulling protest art off their walls. People were selling apartments and saying goodbyes. Many of Wong’s closest allies had booked tickets to foreign countries where they intended to seek asylum. But Wong didn’t have that option: His passport had been confiscated by the police.
If his renown was a vulnerability, Wong reasoned, it might also be his path out. The U.S. government maintained a few offices in the St. John’s Building, and Wong had set up a routine meeting with two American diplomats.
“I don’t want to leave,” Wong told them as the meeting ended. “I want to go to the U.S. consulate.”
His gambit drew on a famous precedent and a vexed history. The United States had cast its lot, at least verbally, with the democracy movement in Hong Kong, and the administration of then-President Donald Trump styled itself as tough on China. But how much was it willing to venture for the democratic opponents of the Chinese Communist regime?
Back in 1989, the United States seemed to have weighed this problem and come down on the side of principle.
Fang Lizhi was a Chinese astrophysicist with an extracurricular interest in political philosophy and political systems. His belief in democracy was as public as it was forthright, making him a figure of global stature in the years preceding the Tiananmen Square protests. A sketch of his face, round and sanguine, graced the cover of the May 1988 issue of The Atlantic: In it, he wore a slight smile and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. Fang was China’s Andrei Sakharov, the journalist Orville Schell wrote, a “man of not only keen intelligence and conviction but fearlessness.”
The day after the massacre—June 5, 1989—gunfire still rang out in the streets of Beijing as Fang, his wife, their son, and the academic Perry Link, who was a longtime friend, scrambled into the U.S. embassy compound. McKinney Russell, a diplomat and polyglot who was the head of the press and cultural section, and Ray Burghardt, the acting deputy chief of mission, met them inside.
Before he sat down with Fang, Burghardt had consulted his ambassador, James Lilley, a former CIA operative. Lilley was alarmed at the prospect of the Fangs seeking refuge there, fearing that they might get stuck in limbo. Burghardt walked away with the impression that he should talk the Fangs out of it. He told Fang that American protection could discredit him and the Chinese democracy movement: The Communist Party would dismiss Fang as a pawn of the United States, his presence at the embassy proof that the American “black hand” was behind the protests. The argument seemed persuasive. Fang and his family left, and the procedure-abiding diplomats reported the incident back to Washington.
Several hours later, Washington, on instruction from President George H. W. Bush, responded to the diplomats’ cable. Over a secure line, the administration delivered an unambiguous message: Go to the Fangs immediately. Tell them that if they wish to seek asylum, they would be “welcomed by the president of the United States.”
Russell and Burghardt raced to the Jianguo Hotel. They snuck into the back entrance, received the family—suitcases already packed—and climbed into an unmarked American van, which raced back to the U.S. embassy. There, the senior Fangs would live for the next year, until the United States negotiated their safe release to Britain. (Their son had gone back to his university studies in Beijing after a month, smuggled out of the embassy in another covert operation.)
Washington understood why the diplomats initially handled the Fangs in the way they did. On top of the political sensitivity, the request was technically out of line, as asylum can normally be granted only in-country, not at a consulate on foreign soil. But the administration’s ultimate concern, Burghardt told us, was that “regardless of what we said or how we recounted what had happened, the story would always be that we kicked them out and they got arrested.” And so the United States broke the rules to protect the Fangs. “It is a sort of fascinating example of the tension that always exists in American foreign policy, between the realist, strategic approach and the need to continue to uphold and to demonstrate our values,” Burghardt told us.
Fang and his family eventually moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he worked as a physics professor at the University of Arizona until he died in 2012 at age 76. That same year, in April, Washington made another life-altering exception. Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who had championed disability and land rights, made a perilous escape from house arrest. He was given protection at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped negotiate his release to New York City, what she called “an example of American values in practice.”
American values clearly aligned with those of the movement in Hong Kong—such, certainly, was the message Wong and his fellow activists heard loud and clear from Washington in 2019 and 2020. American politicians across party lines praised Hong Kongers for standing up to China in defense of freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and, most of all, democracy. Some of the demonstrations turned violent, but Hong Kong remained a cause célèbre inside the Beltway, where stalwarts of both parties had deep connections to the city.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a decades-long supporter of human rights in China, lauded the protesters, as did Jim McGovern, one of the most liberal members of Congress. But any politician would have been hard-pressed, in 2019, to outdo Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, two of Trump’s closest legislative allies, in performative support. Cruz, the Texas Republican, traveled to Hong Kong in mid-October, wearing all black—in solidarity, he said. A few days later, Hawley, of Missouri, planted himself among teens in athletic gear and yellow helmets to tweet details of a nighttime standoff between protesters and police. Both men invoked Berlin and cast Hong Kong as the new center of a global struggle between democracy and communism.
No such sense of mission animated the president, however. Trump had billed his administration as one that took risks and was tough on China. But his position on Hong Kong was muddled, erratic, and guided primarily by his fixation on Chinese President Xi Jinping and his desire to secure a trade deal. The entire U.S.-Chinese relationship, for Trump, came down to dealmaking.
The Hong Kong democracy movement did not understand Washington in these terms. They saw a president who claimed to be tough on China, together with bipartisan concern for the fate of their city. Why wouldn’t the United States take a stand for one of the movement’s representatives?
Wong enlisted Jeffrey Ngo, a gregarious candidate for a Ph.D. in history at Georgetown University and a former member of Wong’s prodemocracy group, to help him execute a plan. Wong and Ngo had worked together since 2016 to win support for Hong Kong from American lawmakers, meeting with dozens of staffers and officials in the administration. Now they would appeal to those contacts for help.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a meeting over a secure phone line with his closest advisers on May 23, 2020. Details of China’s national-security law were still not public, but Pompeo was preparing to respond to its implementation by announcing that America no longer considered Hong Kong sufficiently autonomous to warrant separate treatment under U.S. law. He wanted policy suggestions on what should follow.
The advisers threw out a long list of punishments: enacting sanctions against top officials, scrapping training programs with the Hong Kong police, stopping the export of defense equipment to Hong Kong. Miles Yu, Pompeo’s China-policy adviser, suggested that Washington create a special immigration pathway for Hong Kong residents. Britain had done this. Canada and Australia were also working on such schemes. And admitting Hong Kongers wasn’t just charitable. The United States could offer special visas to Hong Kong residents with university degrees or with specialized skills; the country stood to benefit from fleeing Hong Kong talent.
The policy recommendations reached Trump, whose National Security Council had also prepared three lists of options in response to China’s strangling of Hong Kong. Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and Ivan Kanapathy—the NSC’s director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia and deputy senior director for Asian affairs—described theirs as a “Goldilocks” menu: One option included a list of “hot” measures (a maximalist approach); the second, “cold” ones; and the last, in-between.
The “hot” list comprised actions that had nothing to do with Hong Kong but that China hawks had long sought the opportunity to take, such as closing the Chinese consulate in Houston, where Washington claimed that spies were aiding in espionage and the theft of scientific research. Trump picked the “hot” menu. He even liked Yu’s immigration idea.
“President Trump said, ‘Why don’t we just open up? Why don’t we just let a huge portion of people from Hong Kong move to the U.S.?’ And I loved it,” Pottinger told us. “You know, my view was just, transplant the whole damn city and make a new Hong Kong in America. [Trump] was like, ‘They’re going to be industrious; they’ll be great. They’ll make great Americans.’”
But Stephen Miller, Trump’s far-right political adviser, stopped the immigration scheme from going further. He was “very persuasive,” Yu told us.
The White House and the State Department moved forward on most of the other measures. As one senior official said: “So now we’re going to be thinking about Taiwan. We need to be thinking about the next steps and saying, Look, if you’re going to kill the golden goose, we’re not going to put the goose on fucking life support. We’re going to let you kill the goose. And then we’re also going to make sure that you regret it.”
Pompeo announced on May 27, 2020, that Hong Kong no longer had a high degree of autonomy. In the Rose Garden, Trump promised to eliminate “policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment.” Then the president went off script and vowed to cut America’s ties with the World Health Organization. The WHO announcement completely overshadowed the Hong Kong news.
Wong wanted to enter the U.S. consulate. The diplomats told him that only the rooms in the St. John’s Building were on offer, and that the office tower did not offer the protection of a diplomatic compound. In Washington, Ngo took the matter up with one of Hawley’s policy advisers, reasoning that the ultra-Trumpian senator might have the president’s ear. Responding at 1 a.m., Hawley’s staffer promised to pass the message on to his boss, but nothing changed.
On July 1, the national-security law passed. The diplomats’ positions were the same: Wong couldn’t enter the consulate and couldn’t apply for asylum from outside the United States. Wong and Ngo knew the rules. But they were asking for the same pathway to haven that had been granted to Fang and Chen.
For years, Ngo had worked behind the scenes for Wong, writing op-eds in his name and even editing his tweets. Now he wrote an email above Wong’s signature to the secretary of state. “I want nothing more than to continue to fight for democracy and freedoms in my home,” it read. “But there is legitimate danger that I become a prime target of arrest and detention … I request U.S. protection so that I may apply for asylum, including as necessary traveling to the U.S. for the purpose of applying for asylum.”
The email landed in the inbox of Mary Kissel, Pompeo’s senior adviser, just after noon on July 1 in Washington. Kissel knew Wong and Ngo personally and had lived in Hong Kong as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She got the message where it needed to go.
Within the next 48 hours, Pompeo summoned his half dozen or so top officials to discuss Wong’s request. They immediately ruled out sheltering him at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. Plans were already under way to close the Chinese consulate in Houston, and when the announcement came, Beijing would likely retaliate. If Wong was hiding in the U.S. consulate, Beijing could close it down. Or Beijing could demand Wong’s release in exchange for American prisoners—it could snatch Americans off the streets in Hong Kong and hold them in arbitrary detention for this purpose.
The officials considered covertly extracting Wong from Hong Kong instead. But Hong Kong’s geography was unforgiving—the city shared a land border solely with mainland China, which meant that the only escape would be by boat across the Taiwan Strait or south toward the Philippines. Wong would risk encountering the Chinese Coast Guard in those waters, and American involvement could make for an international incident. Options dwindled. Soon the officials came to believe that none remained.
Pompeo and his advisers decided that the United States could neither let Wong into the consulate nor extract him from Hong Kong. “You’ve got national interest and personal interest, and in some ways you try to find a balance between the two,” one senior official involved in the process told us. “In the end, you know, on the seventh floor of the State Department, national interest won out.”
The decision was hardly unanimous in Washington. A National Security Council memo to the State Department opined that Wong should be protected, but deferred to State as the deciding authority with, as Pottinger later told us, a “fuller picture” of the facts. Pottinger’s deputy, Kanapathy, told us that fear of what Beijing would do in response was the “absolute wrong” reason to refuse to help Wong: “If you can’t do what I think a lot of people would say is the right thing [because] you’re afraid they’re going to do the wrong thing, then you’ve already lost.”
The State Department’s decision was, strangely, kept close. No one informed Wong or Ngo that the die was cast. In August, Ngo appealed to Pelosi and Senator Marco Rubio, both of whom had worked with Wong since he was a teen. They made calls to State on Wong’s behalf, pushing the request at the “highest levels,” according to one Hill staffer. At one point, a fellow Hong Kong activist named Nathan Law, who had slipped away to London just before the national-security law passed, met with Pompeo in private, raising Wong’s plight directly and emotionally. Nothing changed.
The issue “dragged,” one State Department official involved told us, “and it lingered, and then the inevitable happened.” Wong was arrested in September 2020 and then remanded in custody in late November. Last year, he pled guilty to charges of subversion under the national-security law.
The democracy movement in Hong Kong made little secret of the hope it placed in Washington. Some protesters flew American flags in the street, or made public appeals, whether to Trump’s gigantic ego or to Pelosi’s support for Chinese democracy activists dating back to Tiananmen. Many believed that America had the ability to alter Beijing’s course of action. They were wrong. What the United States could have offered was a haven, but it didn’t.
Washington made no special provision for Hong Kongers who wanted to emigrate to the United States. Cruz, notwithstanding his show of solidarity, killed a bill in December 2020 that included provisions for temporary protected status for Hong Kongers and expedited certain refugee and asylum applications. In a self-aggrandizing memoir, Pompeo wrote that he wished he had done more to punish China over Hong Kong, but he made no reference to Joshua Wong.
The focus in Washington has moved on from Hong Kong to Taiwan. The island is under constant military threat from Beijing, which claims the territory as its own, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never controlled it. But for those in Taiwan who cherish their democracy, Hong Kong’s story offers a cautionary tale. The United States gave Hong Kong’s cause its vocal backing, then abandoned the city in its time of greatest need.
This article has been adapted from Shibani Mahtani and Tim McLaughlin’s new book, Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, And Exile In The Battle For Hong Kong And The Future Of Global Democracy.
By Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin
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