People light candles at a vigil in Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4, 2020, after the annual remembrance for the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown was banned on public health grounds during the pandemic.YAN ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images
Rowena He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China.
“In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands have gathered in Victoria Park each June 4 to hold a candlelight vigil to remember those young lives that were violently cut short…The image of the endless sea of candles has become as iconic as the Tank Man, reminding us that Tiananmen is not just about repression, but also about hope.”
When I wrote those words in 2019, before the annual vigil marking the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that would be the last time the event would take place. I didn’t know that the organization that held the public remembrance, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (HK Alliance), would be forced to disband two years later amid allegations that it was an “agent of foreign forces,” leading to the arrest of its members under the National Security Law imposed by Beijing in Hong Kong in 2020.
I did not know that I, a scholar of the history of the Tiananmen Movement and its subsequent massacre, would eventually be denied a work visa to return to Hong Kong, ending my position as an associate professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After studying political exiles for more than two decades, I became one myself.
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Those who have tried to preserve the memories of atrocities perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party have been silenced, imprisoned or forced into exile. Now, three of the HK Alliance’s leaders – former Hong Kong legislators Albert Ho and Lee Cheuk-yan, and barrister Chow Hang-tung, who had been arrested in 2021 – will go on trial on Thursday, and they face up to 10 years’ imprisonment on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.”
While “ending one-party rule, building a democratic China” has been the HK Alliance’s slogan since it was founded during the 1989 protests – its mission to support China’s “patriotic democratic movements” through nonviolence surviving even after the 1997 handover – one of the judges in the Alliance leaders’ case affirmed a prosecutor’s argument in November that “any attempt to end one-party rule is considered unconstitutional” under the NSL.
But the ideal of ending the one-party rule of the KMT (Nationalist Party) and building a democratic China was also the very promise that Mao Zedong and the CCP made to mobilize the people against the KMT during the Chinese civil war. China’s constitution, including the 2018 amendment that allowed Xi Jinping to be elected to an unprecedented third term, never describes its political system as “one-party rule,” though it has been one through the PRC’s history. The constitution describes China’s political system as “the people’s democratic dictatorship,” with a “system of multiparty cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China” being a basic element.
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Communist leaders claim that Hong Kong is now governed by “patriots” loyal to mainland China and the CCP. Candidates in Hong Kong elections have to be vetted to ensure they are “patriotic.” But in 1989, students in Tiananmen Square called their movement patriotic, too. Following the Chinese tradition of Confucian dissent, they were not aiming for regime change; they considered it their responsibility as loyal citizens to build a better China.
The Alliance, with its annual Victoria Park vigil becoming the only public stage in China where the voices of the Tiananmen Mothers who lost their children in 1989 could be heard, sought to do the same. They embodied the concept of “a higher kind of loyalty” put forward by the journalist Liu Binyan: Loyalty to truth and justice, loyalty with conscience. Mr. Liu himself was exiled from China after the Tiananmen massacre and was never able to set foot in his homeland again.
My last visit to Victoria Park came on the Tiananmen anniversary in 2022. Walking in darkness around the six soccer fields that used to be packed with people lighting candles, I encountered many strangers, old and young. Surrounded by police, we subtly exchanged eye contact, like old friends from the past, reminding each other that we were not alone.
Victoria Park has itself become a space of memory and identity. Together with the HK Alliance, it is part of the Hong Kong spirit, a spirit of humanity that cannot be crushed by guns and tanks and jails. History will one day return a verdict that Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan, Chow Hang-tung were not guilty, and I hope the Hong Kong court does likewise. After all, commemorating Tiananmen is not a crime; the massacre is.