Is Hong Kong the next Tiananmen Square?

By calling it ‘collective amnesia,’ are you suggesting that the phenomenon of people forgetting about the history of June 4th is a disease?” my author friend was asked. It was in an interview for Hong Kong Free Press about her book “The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited,” which uncovered stories about the 1989 massacre that have remained untold for a quarter of a decade. Four years have passed since she was interviewed but nothing has changed. If anything they’ve got worse and we’ve got another disease to worry about from China.

“It’s a Chinese condition,” Louisa Lim replied back then. “I guess you could say that there is almost something contagious about amnesia in that – even those people who were intimately involved in the events of 1989 – nowadays they are unwilling to talk about it. And unwilling to tell their children what happened and what kind of involvement they may have had. They’re worried that that knowledge might have an impact on their children or affect their future in some kind of way. In that sense, the amnesia is kind of like a disease. The fact that these events are not talked about and there’s no accountability for what happened from the very top, all the way down, that’s a really serious issue.”

I contacted her again on Thursday as the evening of the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen uprising arrived in China and in Hong Kong where, for the first time, memorial events were banned ostensibly under the cover of health and safety concerns linked to the pandemic. I wanted to know if she thinks more people know, or openly remember, what happened not just in Beijing in June 1989, but also across the country, and also how she think’s the memory has affected the Hong Kong protest movement. “On the contrary, the memory of June 4 is becoming ever more politically sensitive under the ideological constraints of Xi Jinping’s China,” she answered. “It’s been my experience over the last couple of years that Chinese students studying overseas will not just shy away from discussing Tiananmen, they will sometimes even avoid being present during classroom discussions that touch upon Tiananmen for fear of the consequences.”

Another friend has drawn an even closer and chilling parallel. Author Ma Jian left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987 as a dissident; in 1989, he returned to Beijing and took part in the democracy protests. He lived in Hong Kong for 10 years until the handover. All his books are banned in China.

Like Lim, Ma Jian has chronicled the way that the authorities in Beijing have suppressed the truth about what happened. “Today, Tiananmen Square is a place of oblivion, a memory hole scrutinised by police cameras, suspended from history,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian newspaper. “China is an economic giant, but the lies and murder have never stopped.” He goes further: “Today I am more concerned than I have ever been that the CCP will enact another Tiananmen on Hong Kong’s streets. Whether it happens dramatically with armoured tanks, or more covertly, over years, as it has in Tibet and Xinjiang, Hong Kong’s unique spirit and character will be assailed as the CCP attempts to draw it deeper into its net.

All around the world, people are finding it hard to breathe as the virus that originally emerged in Wuhan spreads through the air, and the boots of demagogues everywhere stamp down on human necks. In China and Hong Kong, the only source of hope will be the stubborn refusal to forget, and the fierce clinging to the humane ideals of the peaceful protesters who filled Tiananmen Square in 1989.”

Lim also has close ties to Hong Kong and noticed at a rally in Melbourne “footage of police brutality in Hong Kong was interspersed with that of 1989 in China, so it now appears that the two are being ever more closely yoked together.”

Remembering is in itself an act of resistance. Yuen Chan, a journalism professor and former CNN and BBC colleague whose family is from Hong Kong says it was a “political birthday” for her, that moment of shock and “visceral sorrow” in 1989 when she heard that the tanks had rolled in and shots fired at the protesters in Beijing.

She contends that it made a deep impact on Hongkongers of all ages and across different walks of life, “created a sense of shared trauma and formed part of the collective memory. It galvanised a generation of Hong Kong students, some became activists, some entered politics and various professions.” In this way, Chan believes that the commemoration of June 4th in Hong Kong is inextricably bound up with Hong Kong’s fate “an attempt to make sense of its past and hopes for its future.”

Even though it was prohibited, Hong Kong people still held a vigil in Victoria Park while sticking to social distancing rules. Friends posted photos of the crowds of people, each holding a candle. Chan quotes cultural studies scholar Law Wing-sang, who said, “to bid farewell to June 4th, is to bid farewell to ourselves, to who we are.”

“The authorities may want us to forget who we are but it is only by remembering how we became ourselves that we can begin to imagine and to build a better version of who we can be. When memory has become a crime, then every act of remembrance is an act of resistance.”

Another former colleague who posted from Victoria Park asked: “How do you stop people from remembering? Not with barriers or police or pre-recorded warnings.”

Reporting for Channel Four News in the UK, Jonathan Miller wondered if this was the last time Hong Kong would remember June 4, 1989, because of the national security law Beijing has imposed on the territory, effectively ending the “one country, two systems” principle which guided the negotiations for the UK to hand the territory over to China.

I find myself agreeing with Ma Jian. Hong Kong people are on course to a destiny dictated by Beijing and as he put it: “dictators will always put their political survival above human life. They will not rest until they have perverted every truth and obliterated all possibility of dissent.”

China is our giant neighbor and Hong Kong has always had close relations with the Philippines. What happens in Beijing and Hong Kong will necessarily affect the course of events for us too.