Police arrested an organiser of Hong Kong’s annual candlelight vigil remembering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown and warned people not to attend the banned event Friday as authorities mute China’s last pro-democracy voices. In recent years some tens of thousands of people have gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to honor the victims who died when China’s military put down student-led pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989, killing thousands.
The PRC’s ruling Communist Party has never allowed any public events marking the military’s attack on protesters and citizens, and security was increased in the Beijing square Friday morning, with police checking pedestrians’ IDs and tour buses shuttling Chinese tourists as on any other day.
The PRC Authorities have actively prevented all discussion of the events on the Chinese mainland, where the few remaining activists and victims’ advocates are put under increased police monitoring and taken away on involuntary “vacations” around the anniversary. Responding to a question about the crackdown, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin on Thursday reiterated China’s stance that its response to the “political turmoil” of 1989 had been correct.
The PRC’s efforts to suppress public memory of the Tiananmen events have in recent years focused on Hong Kong, where the June 4 Museum was closed this week and police again Friday warned residents not to attend the vigil. A nighttime commemorative event in Victoria Park has been banned for a second year under coronavirus pandemic restrictions, although the city has had no local cases for over six weeks.
This latest action comes amid sweeping moves to quell dissent in the city, including a new national security law, election changes and arrests of many activists who participated in pro-democracy protests that swept Hong Kong in 2019. Hong Kong police said Friday that they would be cordoning off parts of Victoria Park, including football fields and basketball pitches, to prevent any gatherings to commemorate the crackdown.
Local media including the South China Morning Post newspaper reported this week that the police were planning to deploy about 7,000 officers on Friday to enforce the ban on unauthorised protests. Taking part in an illegal gathering has a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment.
Chow Hang Tung, vice chair of the group, was arrested Friday morning, according to the alliance, which organised the vigil and ran the June 4 Museum dedicated to the memory of Tiananmen. After the ban was issued, Chow urged people to commemorate the event privately by lighting a candle wherever they are. Last year, thousands went to Victoria Park to light candles and sing songs.
More than 20 activists including Chow were charged for their participation in an unauthorised assembly. Two other key members of the Hong Kong Alliance — Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho — are behind bars for taking part in unauthorised assemblies in 2019.
An appeal from Tiananmen Mothers, published on the Human Rights in China website, urged the party to release official records about the crackdown, provide compensation for those killed and injured, and hold those responsible to account. Tiananmen Mothers said 62 of its members have died since the group representing victims’ relatives was founded in the late 1990s. It said many young Chinese have “grown up in a false sense of prosperous jubilance and enforced glorification of the government (and) have no idea of or refuse to believe what happened on June 4, 1989, in the nation’s capital.”
The suppression of commemorations of the Tiananmen victims has been accompanied in recent years by harsh repression (if not genocide) against religious and ethnic minorities in Tibet, the northwestern region of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, along with the sharp curtailing of political rights in Hong Kong. Apologists for the PRC abound, from the hard left activists, too the hard right new liberal free marketeers - turning a blind eye to brutal repression (anywhere) is simply unacceptable in the twenty first century.
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