The world should take notice of the courage of Joshua Wong

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      Chinese president Xi Jinping has never paid much attention to outcries from human rights activists in western industrialized countries.

      This was demonstrated when he ensured that Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo languished in jail until his death in 2017. Lui was not even allowed to travel to the west when he was suffering with liver cancer.

      Meanwhile, there are reports that up to a million or more Uygurs are being detained in concentration camps in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in western China.

      Then there are the two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who were jailed in an apparent tit-for-tat after Huawei executive Meng Wangzhou was arrested in Vancouver in response to a U.S. extradition request.

      Two other Canadians, Fan Wei and Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, are on death row in China after being convicted of drug offences.

      Nobody knows how many people are executed every year in the People's Republic of China, but it's possibly thousands every year, according to the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

      In light of this, one must marvel over the courage of Joshua Wong, secretary general of the Demosistō, which is a pro-democracy party in Hong Kong.

      The 22-year-old activist was arrested in 2014 when he was one of the leaders of the Umbrella Movement that advocated for democracy in Hong Kong.

      He was arrested again in 2015 and claimed that this time, he was beaten by police.

      Then on a trip to Taiwan, gangsters posing as pro-China activists tried to assault him at the airport. He was also detained on a trip to Thailand.

      Then in 2017, he was convicted of contempt of court in Hong Kong for defying an order regarding a protest and the next year, he was sentenced to three months in jail.

      He received another short jail sentence this year dating back to his actions with the Umbrella Movement in 2014.

      But Wong won't remain quiet in his quest for democracy in Hong Kong.

      After massive protests on July 1, he issued a series of tweets outlining the sequence of events that led to young people storming the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong.

      You can read these tweets below:

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