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Keeping vigil

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Friday marks the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Previously, Hong Kong’s annual 4 June vigil drew well over 100,000 people to Victoria Park.

This year, citing Covid-19, Hong Kong officials have banned the commemoration. Last year, in spite of a pandemic-related ban, thousands showed up. Two dozen demonstrators, including protest leader Joshua Wong and Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai, were arrested and charged for taking part in the vigil. Thus far, four have been sentenced.

But that group was arrested and tried under existing laws. The 2021 anniversary is the first since China passed its National Security Law, considerably raising the stakes for those who dare defy the ban. The law is repressive, wide-ranging and vague, and gives the authorities unfettered power to pursue critics.Hong Kong Alliance, which organises the annual vigil, announced on Saturday it would not hold or promote its decades-old ceremony. The danger was too steep. A statement from the Security Bureau makes clear that ‘No one should take part in it, or advertise or publicise it, or else he or she may violate the law.’ If found guilty, a participant could face up to five years in prison.

Instead, said Hong Kong Alliance vice-chair Hang Tung Chow, organisers are calling on individuals to light a candle at 8pm on 4 June. ‘The government didn’t ban people lighting a candle wherever they are,’ she said in an interview.

With such a strong warning from the government, however, the pressure has been mounting to the point where even that simple action may feel risky. ‘To be honest, there is a climate of fear in Hong Kong now,’ said Chow. ‘I’m not sure people feel safe. I think people will have some fear but I hope they will still come out.’

Hong Kong’s massive vigil always stood in sharp contrast to the mainland. There, erasure of 4 June and the events leading to it is nearly complete; each year hundreds of internet search terms related to the democracy protests and crackdown are blocked by China’s censors. A nationwide amnesia has set in. Will that come to pass in Hong Kong? The answer to that question, said Chow, ‘depends on whether we still come out. If everyone disappears it will become just like China where nobody talks about June 4.’

In 1989, China’s democracy movement was snuffed with tanks and guns. In recent years, Hong Kong’s has been repressed with mass arrests, intimidation and violence. But blowing out a candle doesn’t stop new ones from being lit; these movements have not vanished.

‘The lesson from June 4 is that the fight for democracy can be really long term and you just have to expect pressure, you have to expect imprisonment. You have to expect all that and still persist,’ said Chow. ‘There are a lot of fighters in China who took part in 1989 and continue their activism until now—that should give us courage as well. It’s a long term march.’
 

Notebook

Never forget

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

You can count on several things happening like clockwork this time of year relating to the dramatic and tragic events that took place in Beijing 32 years ago.

In places far from Beijing, the iconic image of a lone man standing in front of a line of tanks will make many appearances. And people will hold events to honour the martyrs and reflect on the meaning of the 1989 massacre that in English is usually associated with a place name, Tiananmen, and in Chinese with a date, 4 June.

Inside of Beijing, meanwhile, the lead up to the anniversary will see a tightening of controls on means of expression. There will be no displays of the Tank Man photograph that was taken on 5 June 1989. There will be no panels or group gatherings associated with last hours of 3 June and first hours of 4 June 1989, during which soldiers killed hundreds or perhaps thousands—there has never been a complete count—of people in the heart of the capital of the People’s Republic of China

Personally, there are also predictable aspects of this time of year.

I always think about the dramatic wave of protests that brought large crowds to the central plazas of cities across China in April and May of 1989. I think about the Big Lie that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cleaves to about those protests and the crackdown that ended them, which included not just the massacre in Beijing but also a smaller one in Chengdu, the definitive account of which appears in Louisa Lim’s The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. How long, I wonder, will the CCP deny that 1989 saw largely peaceful expressions of concern for the country and brutal acts of state violence? How long will the CCP insist that it is best to keep silent about the events of that spring—or present them as events that pit a small set of troublemakers spurred on by nefarious outsiders and intent to create ‘chaos’ against soldiers who exercised great restraint while restoring ‘order’ and in some cases lost their lives while doing so?

Read the full essay here.
 

See it:

Winners of the annual Sovereign Asian Art Prize were announced last week, with Chinese performance artist Li Binyuan taking top prize. The finalists come from across Asia and Australia, and a gallery of their excellent works—along with interviews—can be viewed here.

• Tags: Hong Kong, Newsletter