July 21, 2026, marked the seventh anniversary of the July 21 Yuen Long attack during Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill movement. Two Hong Kong immigrants living in Toronto organized a 24-hour relay sit-in at Pacific Mall to restate the facts of the incident to the international community and call for accountability from the Hong Kong government and police.
Since immigrating to Canada in 2020, Kwong Wan-leung has continued to organize annual commemorations of key dates from the protest movement, including June 12, July 21, and Aug. 31. This year marked the seventh consecutive year he has held such events.
Kwong said that watching Hong Kong’s human rights and rule-of-law conditions continue to deteriorate has left him with an enduring sense of pain and powerlessness. He chose to hold a full-day sit-in to mourn all those who suffered and to send a message that, even if those in power try to make people forget, the collective memory of Hong Kongers will not be erased.
Dino Chan used the event to recount the judicial controversies surrounding the case over the past seven years, arguing that the Hong Kong government and police cannot evade responsibility.
He noted that the Yuen Long Police Station temporarily closed its public service counter that night, while police later said it took them nearly 50 minutes to arrive at the scene, prompting accusations that officers had deliberately failed to act. Video footage also appeared to show police officers turning away after witnessing acts of violence.
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Chan went on to list a series of disputed issues. He said crucial portions of surveillance footage from the MTR station where the attack occurred had been deleted, while incomplete video was later admitted as evidence in court.
He also said that although the faces of many of the white-shirted attackers were clearly visible, some have still not been prosecuted. By contrast, journalists who documented the incident, district councillors who went to the scene to mediate, and ordinary passengers who defended themselves were subsequently convicted or sentenced.
Some citizens were prosecuted simply for consulting publicly available vehicle registration records in an effort to investigate the attack, he said, adding that the number of people arrested in connection with those efforts eventually exceeded the number of assailants arrested.
The assault was allegedly planned in advance
Chan also cited independent documentaries showing that the attackers had allegedly planned the assault in advance and prepared weapons beforehand. He said pro-establishment figures had also made public remarks before the incident that critics viewed as inflammatory.
“When documenting the truth becomes a crime, and pursuing justice comes at the cost of one’s freedom, the absurdity of the times has reached its peak,” Chan said.
Addressing the widespread concern among Hong Kongers overseas that political activity abroad could affect relatives still living in Hong Kong, Chan said he understood those fears. For that reason, he participated in the event in his personal capacity and did not pressure others to appear publicly.
He stressed that even one person should do everything possible to preserve public memory. His greatest concern, he said, is that fear could eventually cause the history of July 21 to follow the path of the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown—gradually fading from one generation to the next and allowing those in power to rewrite the past.
“Silence and forgetting will only become accomplices to wrongdoing,” he said.
The two participants presented four demands during the sit-in.
First, they strongly condemned what they described as the Hong Kong government’s and police force’s long-running efforts to conceal the truth, destroy surveillance evidence, and reverse right and wrong.
Second, they called on the international community to pursue legal and historical accountability for those involved through a process modeled on the Nuremberg trials.
Third, they urged governments to designate the Chinese Communist Party as a terrorist organization.
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