Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong told an audience in the German capital of Berlin that his city was now a bulwark between the free world and the "dictatorship of China".

In Berlin to give a talk

The 22-year-old activist was in Berlin for a newspaper-sponsored event at the German parliament celebrating human rights activists around the world.

He arrived at the airport to a waiting media.

The Hong Kong protesters' cause has been popular with Germans.

What Wong said

Wong pledged that protests in his pluralistic autonomous city would not be lulled into complacency.

He said protests will be kept up even after the city's government dropped the controversial extradition bill.

He then compared the struggle of Hong Kong's pro-democracy protesters to the role of Berlin during the Cold War.

"If we are in a new Cold War, Hong Kong is the new Berlin," he said in a reception space close to the Berlin Wall on the roof of the Reichstag building.

The significance of the space was probably not lost on Wong.

For decades, it occupied the no-man's land between Communist East Berlin and the city's capitalist western half.

Comments on China

Wong is the leader of the Demosisto pro-democracy movement and one of its most prominent faces.

"We urge the free world to stand together with us in resisting the Chinese autocratic regime," he added, describing Chinese leader Xi Jinping as "not a president but an emperor."

Wong said the protesters, who suffered what he claims were human rights violations committed against them, would try to hold the city's government responsible.

Wong also said chief executive Carrie Lam's climb-down at scrapping the bill was a ruse to buy calm ahead of China's Oct. 1 national day.

Wong had briefly been detained by Hong Kong authorities before his departure earlier in the day for breaching bail conditions following his arrest in August.

His arrest and 24-hour detention turned out to be a blunder committed by the lawyers from the prosecution and defence teams.

He has been charged along with other prominent activists with inciting and participating in an unauthorised assembly.

German leader urged to do more

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has just returned from a trip to China.

She faced criticism from Germany for not engaging more directly with the Hong Kong protesters.

Merkel did call for a peaceful solution to the Hong Kong unrest.