"Not that nobody cares about what he says, but it's just that Joshua Wong alone cannot represent the whole Online Cigarettes Store USA of Hong Kong," said Sean Au, a 17-year-old student. "He is just a participant, no longer a leader."
His activities have nonetheless made him a target of the Chinese government, which Newport Pleasure has used him to accuse foreign powers of colluding with anti-China separatists to foment unrest.
Wong's activism started at age 13 when he joined protests against a proposed high-speed rail link between Hong Kong and mainland China. The link opened last year after many delays.
The bespectacled teen set up a student activist group, Scholarism, months later and rallied more than 100,000 people to protest a plan to implement mandatory patriotic education in schools. The government eventually dropped the plan.
It was the 2014 Umbrella Revolution that propelled Wong into the global spotlight. Protesters occupied major thoroughfares Newport 100s Box in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory for 79 days in an ultimately unsuccessful push for direct elections for the city's leaders.
Wong co-founded a political party, Demosisto, in 2016, but its members were disqualified from serving and later even running for office because they advocated self-determination. He remains secretary-general of the organization, which now describes itself on Twitter as a movement-oriented youth activist group.