Hong Kong authorities yesterday strove to stop any public commemoration of the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, with police warning that gatherings could break the law as Beijing vies to remove all reminders of the events of June 4, 1989, when the Chinese government sent troops and tanks to break up peaceful protests, crushing a weeks-long wave of demonstrations calling for political change and curbs on official corruption.
Hundreds, by some estimates more than 1,000, were killed in the crackdown.
Discussion of what happened is highly sensitive in China. Hong Kong had been the one place where large-scale remembrance was still tolerated — until two years ago when Beijing imposed a National Security Law to snuff out dissent after huge democracy protests in 2019.
Photo: Reuters
Authorities on Friday warned the public that “participating in an unauthorized assembly” risked a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
They also closed large parts of Victoria Park, once the site of packed annual candlelight vigils attended by tens of thousands.
One woman told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that she had lit a candle at home instead and placed a replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue, the original of which stood in Tiananmen Square in 1989, on her windowsill.
Photo: Reuters
“For me and many Hong Kongers of my generation, June 4 was our political enlightenment,” said the 49-year-old public relations professional, who used to volunteer for the vigil’s organizers.
She said she was planning to walk around the territory wearing a T-shirt with June 4 numerals as a more “subtle” form of commemoration, given the legal risks.
China has gone to exhaustive lengths to erase the crackdown from collective memory, omitting it from history textbooks, and scrubbing references to it from the Chinese Internet and social media platforms.
Photo: Bloomberg
Authorities in Beijing yesterday set up facial recognition devices at roads leading to Tiananmen Square and stopped passersby to check their identification. The security presence in the area was noticeably bulked up, with two to three times the regular number of officers visible.
In Hong Kong, the area around Victoria Park was heavily policed, with long lines of security vehicles parked next to it.
On Friday night, in the nearby bustling Causeway Bay shopping district, a performance artist who whittled a potato into the shape of a candle and held a lighter to it was surrounded by more than a dozen officers and taken away in a police van, an AFP reporter saw.
Police later said they had arrested a 31-year-old woman for “disorderly conduct in a public place.”
“The government is so scared of any possible assembly,” said Dorothy, a 32-year-old coach who spoke to AFP near the park yesterday morning.
She said she had not been a regular attendee at the vigils, but that it was “a great loss for the society... The most profound impact is on the younger generations as the vigil used to be a window to let them know that such an appalling incident took place in China.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday pledged to continue to “honor and remember those who stood up for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
“While many are no longer able to speak up themselves, we and many around the world continue to stand up on their behalf and support their peaceful efforts to promote democracy and the rights of individuals,” he said, referring to the situation in Hong Kong.
Multiple Western Consulate Generals in Hong Kong yesterday posted Tiananmen tributes on social media as well.
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