The Tiananmen Square Massacre will turn 35 this Tuesday (4), with China’s usual repression to prevent any mention of the date and Hong Kong’s ban on its traditional vigil to honor the victims.
This way, Taiwan will be the only Chinese-speaking territory to remember the episode with an event in the city center.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated this Monday (3), from its headquarters in New York, that the Chinese authorities “again anticipated the memory” to “try to erase the memory of the massacre”.
Zhan human rights who was a student representative in 1989, HRW said in a statement.
In recent days, the China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) has again asked for clarification on what happened on the night of June 3-4, 1989, when Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldiers and tanks invaded Tiananmen Square, in the central region of Beijing.
Hundreds of thousands of students and workers had been demonstrating for weeks for an end to corruption and greater political openness.
The number of people killed in the military repression is still unknown and ranges from hundreds to thousands, depending on the source.
According to Maya Wang, China director at HRW, “Beijing has failed to extinguish the flames of memory of those who risked everything to promote respect for human rights in the country.”
Veto in Hong Kong
For more than three decades, thousands of people have gathered in Hong Kong’s famous Victory Park to peacefully and by candlelight honor the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a tradition that was last held in 2019 and has now been replaced. by a “carnival” organized by pro-Beijing groups.
The group organizing these annual vigils, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of China’s Democratic Patriotic Movements, was disbanded in September 2021 following the arrest of its main leaders – accused of inciting “subversion” – and authorities no longer allow this. celebration, citing the need to “safeguard national security” in the former British colony.
In recent days, on the eve of the day in remembrance of the massacre, the police arrested eight people – the last one this Monday -, including a former organizer of the vigil who is currently in prison, for allegedly making publications about the date “with content seditious inciting hatred.”
These were the first known arrests under a new national security law passed in March by the Hong Kong government to complement one imposed in 2020 by Beijing to defuse massive pro-democracy protests in 2019.
Local authorities sought to eradicate any mention of the events, and the museum displaying documents and artifacts from the 1989 protests was closed.
Books on the subject also disappeared from libraries, and in May 2023, the Pillar of Shame, a statue honoring the victims that had already been removed from the University of Hong Kong in 2021, was confiscated.
Taiwan, the last stronghold
Meanwhile, in Taiwan, remembrance will once again focus on the square in front of Chiang Kai-shek’s mausoleum in central Taipei, a symbol of the repression to which the country was subjected for four decades.
As every year, protesters will light candles and carry banners at a vigil that, following the implementation of the national security law and the persecution of Hong Kong protesters, will be the only one to be held in Chinese-speaking territories.
The event will be accompanied by an art exhibition at the mausoleum itself: under the title “LifeDeathPreserveForgotten”, the exhibition brings together the works of 18 artists from around the world, including Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, around the desires for democracy and freedom .
#Taiwan #remember #Tiananmen #Square #Massacre