The Candlelight Has Died Out in Hong Kong

In the days and weeks following the massacre in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989, Hong Kong was a city in a state of barely controlled panic and fear. Unlike in mainland China, the events in Beijing were plastered in full graphic detail throughout the Hong Kong media. Photos of bodies hanging from bridges and lying in the streets of the Chinese capital commanded the front pages of print media and dominated daily news broadcasts.

Since then, there has been no better barometer of the state of freedom of speech and assembly in Hong Kong than the degree to which the people of Hong Kong have openly participated in the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre commemorations that are held each year – or were held.

Able to cancel the ceremonial vigil in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19 concerns, the Hong Kong government this year could only find specious reasons to prevent the return of those who, more than three decades later, still commemorate the victims who died in Beijing on June 4, 1989.  The gathering of what would normally have been tens of thousands did not take place, and six people were arrested for allegedly attempting to memorialize the anniversary. The arrested were deemed to have defied the onerous and arbitrary National Security Law that was passed on June 30, 2020. That law, engineered by Beijing, effectively shuts down both speech and actions that are critical of the government or that suggest its illegitimacy, under severe penalties.

Organized by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, a candlelight vigil had been held every year since 1990, the first anniversary of Beijing’s brutal crackdown on demonstrators and ordinary citizens in and around the famous Tiananmen Square. As recently as 2019, amid the anti-extradition bill protests, more than 100,000 people gathered in Victoria Park to mark and memorialize the day that the unarmed ethnic cousins of Hong Kong’s citizens were slaughtered.

There was, however, the taste of an awkward irony that flavored the annual remembrance rallies, especially from the late 1990s on. The vigils saw Hong Kongers gather to mourn the loss of people with whom they would normally have had little in common. Despite a shared Chinese ethnicity, and for those from Guangdong province, a common Cantonese language, the people of Hong Kong and of mainland China have little in the way of a shared cultural orientation. In fact, in recent years, there has typically been little love lost between those on each side of the China-Hong Kong border, a clear function of the stark differences in political and social values and systems under which each has been raised.

Prior to the handover of Hong Kong from British control back to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997, the vast majority of mainland Chinese had had little opportunity or financial ability to visit Hong Kong. It had been virtually impossible for an ordinary mainland Chinese to obtain a visa to travel to Hong Kong. During the late 1990s and the 2000s, however, travel agencies on the mainland took advantage of the government's permission to allow mainland Chinese to travel to Hong Kong in tour groups organized by government-sanctioned operators. What began as curiosity on the part of those throughout China who could increasingly afford it turned into a deluge of Chinese tourists flooding the commercial sections of the former British colony. Both sides began to see one another in a less-than-romanticized light. Culture clashes often turned violent, as the newly minted middle class of rural China came face-to-face with Hong Kongers who may have conveniently forgotten their own often rural roots.

Nothing typifies this dichotomy between the two groups of ethnic Chinese more than the decision by Hong Kong’s universities to boycott the annual commemoration ceremonies for those who died on June 4, 1989.

On the face of it such a boycott seems completely counterintuitive. Why would Hong Kong’s students – who largely embrace democracy and liberal values – withdraw their moral support for the 1989 demonstrators, many of whom were also students at the time?

As Cal Wong wrote in The Diplomat in 2016, the year that the Hong Kong Federation of Students pulled out of the June 4 commemoration vigil, “localist sentiments” prevailed among students, causing them to view the Tiananmen protesters’ cause as alien. As one executive member of the student federation, Paul Liu Chun-sing, said at the time, the Occupy protests in 2014, also known as the Umbrella Movement, were instrumental in changing attitudes about Hong Kong’s identity as a Chinese city. Many young Hong Kongers – and many of the working-class Hong Kong citizens supporting the movement – wanted instead to focus on fighting for democracy for Hong Kong.

Liu summed up the feeling among many.  “I don’t think we need to fight for the ‘political fruits’ for a different race that always invades us,” he said.  “We don’t see the necessity or the obligation to fight for anything on behalf of other ethnicities, outsiders. Instead, I think it is much more practical to strive for democracy for Hong Kong.”

Exacerbated by the universities’ boycott, attendance at the annual vigil in Victoria Park had decreased over the years. Nonetheless, for an event that happened more than a generation ago, indeed before many of the commemorating participants were born, the fact that tens of thousands of Hong Kongers would still turn out to mark the memory of the massacre at the hands of China’s People’s Liberation Army was remarkable. (The Chinese government’s official death toll related to the “incident” is 236.  However, a more impartial source, Sir Alan Donald, the colorful Scottish Sinologist who was British ambassador to China at the time, based on his inside knowledge from a reliable friend of a senior Chinese Communist Party State Council member, put the death toll at over 10,000, more than 40 times higher than the government-sanctioned statistic.)

Now it looks as though the vigils are gone for good, a victim of the sharply curtailed space for political speech in Hong Kong. One of the most disturbing features of the darkness in Victoria Park on this (and likely each succeeding) June 4 is that it serves as proof the National Security Law, with its stiff sentencing for unlawful assembly or anything deemed to incite anti-government actions, has worked. Only the most stalwart are willing to face jail time for defying the law, and they are few.

Hong Kong’s loss of the freedoms that it had been guaranteed by the Basic Law, which was to govern it for 50 years after the handover back to China in 1997, is not happening in isolation or as an ad hoc case. The sinister obliteration of culture and identity that Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities are facing in Xinjiang is a variation on the theme being played out in Hong Kong.  Hong Kong doesn't have “re-education” internment camps (at least not yet), but a broad effort is being made by the Chinese Communist Party to mold young Hong Kong minds in its own image.

Indeed, wiping out all signs, symbols, and ceremonies commemorating those who stood up to power in Beijing in 1989 is only one part of an overall plan by the CCP to erase key elements of the history and culture of Hong Kong as a territory that held dear its freedoms of expression, assembly, and the press.

Recent reports on new textbooks for Hong Kong’s schools provide evidence of the government’s intent to rewrite the overall history of Hong Kong.

Students will be taught that Hong Kong was never a British colony. Instead, according to the CCP’s construction of the story, Britain exercised colonial rule, which it was only able to do as a result of unfair, unequal treaties that forced China to cede control, but never sovereignty.

As the candlelight for those massacred in Beijing by their own government 33 years ago dies out, the risk is that essential pieces of Hong Kong’s character will wither away, as well. The will to not only survive but to thrive has defined not only Hong Kong’s native population, but also those who fled oppressive and authoritarian China from late 1949 on. It can only be hoped that today’s youth generation will find inspiration from its forebearers and strive to live as free and independent people in thought and in spirit, if not now in law.