Ten things we learned about Joshua Wong from the Netflix documentary Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower

Film about to become available worldwide to 100 million-plus subscribers shows Wong became Hong Kong political activist after realising limits of prayer, didn’t buy Benny Tai’s rules for Occupy, and feared going to prison

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Hong Kong student political activist Joshua Wong in a still from the Netflix documentary Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.

Published: 4:17pm, 25 May 2017Updated: 1:07pm, 18 Aug 2017

The story of Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong Chi-fung is set to reach a far wider audience than China would have preferred this week when a documentary about him, Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, becomes available for streaming to the 100 million-plus Netflix subscribers around the world on Friday. The film previously won the audience award in the World Cinema Documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Directed by American filmmaker Joe Piscatella, the 78-minute feature follows the rise of Wong from founding the pro-democracy student-activist group Scholarism at age 14, in 2012 – which takes up more than one-third of the film – to his participation in the 2014 Occupy protests in Hong Kong, in which thousands of activists occupied major roads for 79 days, and finally the founding of the political party Demosisto in 2016.

Pro-Beijing viewers are advised to stay away to avoid a heart attack, however; Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower paints an unbalanced portrait of Wong as a courageous leader of opposition to the Chinese Communist Party. Comments by liberal talking heads pepper the film, which doesn’t hesitate to mention cases of human rights violations such as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown or the recent Hong Kong bookseller saga.

Wong addresses protesters in a still from Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.

Packaged as an introduction to contemporary Hong Kong politics, the film contains little that a keen-eyed Hong Kong resident wouldn’t already have glimpsed from the news in the past few years. Here are 10 lesser-known facts about Wong that the Netflix film nevertheless brings into focus.

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