Unfree Speech by Joshua Wong5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() His mother recalls him babbling like an orator from birth, and dyslexia meant that he learned to be a speechmaker to prove his intelligence. His Christian parents, who married in the weeks after the Tiananmen Square massacre named him Joshua after the Old Testament hero of Jericho, bringing down walls with his trumpet solo. Wong half-believes he was born to the role. ![]() It is also a call to arms to that generation that has known nothing but Instagram and Snapchat – a manifesto to “follow news sites for warning signs of political polarisation”, to use “fact-checking media”, to get out from behind their screens “to attend rallies and help organise election campaigns” and to remember, above all, any effort to preserve democracy “starts with one voice, one flyer and one speech”. This book is a memoir of an extraordinary decade in which Wong went from a nerdy obsession with Marvel comics to a Netflix documentary in which he was characterised as a superhero for democracy. ![]() Wong’s story is not unlike Thunberg’s to the extent that a stubborn school-based protest that might have once been confined to the human-interest pages of the local newspaper quickly became first a national and then a global concern. In a blurb to this book Thunberg describes him as “the future that has already come”. Wong, now 23, and having spent many months in prisons and detention centres, is the gnarled veteran leader of the “umbrella movement” against creeping Chinese authoritarianism. ![]()
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