Seven thousand policemen and up to five years in jail: forbidden to remember the Tiananmen massacre in Hong Kong

Louisa Lim, former BBC China correspondent, visited four universities in Beijing and showed 100 students the photo of the tank man taken by American photographer Jeff Widener. Only 15 recognized the famous image of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Many located the photo in North Korea or Kosovo. Others responded that it was a military parade. Lim turned that survey into a book in 2014, “The People's Republic of Amnesia,” in which he explores how the Chinese government has managed to eradicate what happened on June 4, 1989 from the collective memory.

Tiananmen Square, in the shadow of the Forbidden City, was where Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Also, after seven weeks of protests against corruption, inflation and in favor of democracy, it welcomed the culmination of one of the darkest days in the country's history.. There were hundreds of deaths. maybe thousands. The numbers of the students who were killed by the Chinese troops were never known.

A year ago, Azza Zheng, a 20-something living in Beijing, believed that the Tiananmen event was a rumor about people who violently tried to overthrow the government led by Deng Xiaoping.. When he started reading testimonials and watching videos on YouTube about that June 4th, using a VPN to bypass the censorship of Chinese servers, it took him a while to assimilate that all this content was true and not manipulated.. I had also never seen the picture of the man in the tank.

“It was terrible. But it's something in the past, China has changed a lot and it doesn't look like it was in 1989 at all,” Azza says today, reminding him that this Friday marks the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.. The young woman is partly right.. Surely no country in such a short time has transformed more than China. But more than three decades of development and opening up, three leadership changes and a pandemic have not been enough for Tiananmen to stop being one of the most sensitive issues in Chinese politics, which continues to perpetuate one of the great acts of oblivion that they are remembered.

Like all June 4, access to the square is cut off for any foreign correspondent. Not even one can come within two blocks.. Any commemoration of the victims is prohibited. Any reference to what happened in the Chinese networks disappears after a few minutes thanks to the machinery of automated algorithms and online purgers. Any notes about the anniversary, be it words, photos, or symbols, disappear online.

political taboo

There is also increased surveillance of the elderly people who were part of the student groups that participated in the Tiananmen protests.. During the symbolic date, they are not allowed to speak to the press. To do this, the authorities have been using two tactics for many years: house arrests during the week before the anniversary or forced vacations. In other words, send the activists who were in the square 32 years ago away from Beijing.. Normally they end up in hotels on the southern beaches or in natural areas inland, always watched over by police or officials.. A vacation paid for by the Government so that they are not tempted to remember the bloody day of 1989 in front of a microphone.

“Once you are blacklisted by the Chinese government, you will be tracked for life.. Even relatives of activists who have already died are always under surveillance,” says Fan Baolin, a dissident who was in Tiananmen, spent 17 years in prison and now lives outside of China.. “The massacre remains a political taboo in China. The Communist Party has attempted to erase the incident from the official record and from the curriculum.. Few people are left now, even among those who participated in the protests and were later in prison, who dare to remember in public what happened in Tiananmen,” says Zhou Fengsuo (51 years old), recognized as one of the 21 student leaders of the 1989 protests.

Nine days after Chinese soldiers armed with assault rifles and tanks fired on thousands of protesters, Zhou was detained. He spent a year in prison. She moved to the United States in 1995 and has since collaborated with various China-related human rights associations.. “The Chinese government has never published the total number of deaths that occurred. He has also failed to acknowledge what a tragedy it was to see students being shot by the army, something many in the party internally condemned,” says Zhou.. “Before, you could pay tributes to the victims in Hong Kong or Macao. At least it served as consolation because many people from our land could come together and remember. Now, after Beijing took full control over Hong Kong, they don't even allow commemorations.”.

Any public act of protest or remembrance can lead to prison. They know it well in Hong Kong. For the second year in a row, the autonomous region's authorities have banned an annual vigil held since 1990, where large crowds gathered in the city's Victoria Park to, by light of thousands of candles, remember the dead and ask China to embrace democracy. The ban is excused in the restrictions due to the pandemic. But Hong Kong has not registered local infections for a month and social distancing measures have been reduced.

Activists have accused the authorities of using the health crisis to silence dissenting voices.. Last year, 24 people were arrested for taking part in the first banned vigil for Tiananmen victims.. Four of them, like Joshua Wong, one of the leaders of the protests in the former British colony, have been sentenced to prison.

Hong Kong police have 7,000 riot officers deployed on Friday in the event that citizens try to gather in Victoria Park to hold the vigil.. The city's security office has warned that anyone who participates in, or even promotes, a vigil could face up to five years in jail, citing both public ordinances against gatherings and the national security law passed last year. .

“Once again, the Hong Kong authorities use Covid-19 as an excuse to restrict the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. No one should be punished for simply lighting a candle in memory of the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown,” said Yamini Mishra, Amnesty International's Regional Director for Asia and Oceania.. “The arrests and convictions of those who participated in last year's vigil, in which a safe distance was maintained and which passed peacefully, are a violation of international law,” continues Mishra.

“Hong Kong's ban on candlelight vigils says a lot about the Chinese government's human rights record: that 32 years after the Tiananmen massacre, they have only deepened the repression,” adds Yaqiu Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), the organization that published a report last January assuring that China is currently experiencing the worst repression of human rights since the Tiananmen massacre. Worsening persecution of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet, attacks on whistleblowers, Hong Kong's crackdown, and attempts to cover up the coronavirus outbreak were all part of the deteriorating situation under President Xi Jinping. ” the report said.

News arrived from Hong Kong at noon Friday that police had arrested activist Chow Hang Tung, vice president of the group that organizes the annual vigils for the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown.. As published by the Chinese media, Chow is now detained for “promoting an unauthorized assembly”.. The activist, as her colleagues from Hong Kong's pro-democracy organizations say, wanted to go to Victoria Park to light a candle for the dead of Tiananmen.