Hong Kong holds a candle for Tiananmen
By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - All over China, the central government made sure lights were out
this week on any attempt to mark the 20th anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen
Square crackdown. But Hong Kong once again lit a candle of dissent on Thursday
night - indeed, tens of thousands of them - to honor the Tiananmen dead.
In the only act of open defiance on Chinese soil, an estimated 150,000 people
gathered for a candle-light vigil in the city's Victoria Park to commemorate
the tragedy, demanding that the Chinese leadership reverse its harsh verdict on
the demonstrators and admit it was mistaken to launch a military strike on a
spontaneous pro-democracy movement led by a bunch of naive, idealistic
students.
The perennial June 4 memorial has become part of the fabric of Hong Kong life,
and this important anniversary year saw a spike in
interest, attracting the largest turnout since the vigil began in 1990. Whereas
on the mainland there has been a deafening silence surrounding June 4, in Hong
Kong memories of that night of terror are very much alive.
As a week of painful remembrance comes to an end, it is a good time for a world
that is pondering China's rise to pause and take Hong Kong's pulse.
That pulse, which is now regulated by an authoritarian heart beating in
Beijing, was racing to the point of cardiac arrest at this time 20 years ago.
On the night of June 3, 1989, China's paramount leader, the late Deng Xiaoping,
ordered the country's military to clear Tiananmen Square of thousands of
student-led pro-democracy demonstrators.
By daylight of June 4, the chilling operation was complete, and the world
recoiled in horror.
No one, not even the Chinese government, disputes that the crackdown was brutal
and bloody. But, because Deng also ordered a media blackout to thwart coverage
of the mayhem, the historical debate continues over how many people - dozens,
hundreds or thousands - were bruised, battered or killed that day.
A number not in dispute, however, is the 1 million people who in May and June
of 1989 poured into the streets of Hong Kong in support of the demonstrators.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration promising Hong Kong's return to Chinese
sovereignty in 1997 was then five years old, and the city was both hopeful and
frightened for its future under Chinese rule.
The hope was that democracy would bloom in China; the fear was that hardliners
would prevail and freedom die on the vine.
In the wake of the crackdown, fear trumped hope, and Hong Kong was profoundly
shaken. The city then became a key link in the underground railroad, called
Operation Yellow Bird, that spirited more than 130 student dissidents and
intellectuals out of China and into the West.
But when Hong Kong's leader, chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, recently
described the crackdown as an "incident" that "happened many years ago", he was
clearly implying that the city had moved on to embrace its new master.
He added: "My view represents the opinion of Hong Kong people in general."
Although the chief executive later apologized for his remarks, which produced a
storm of criticism among democrats and did nothing to prop up his sinking
reputation for political acuity, they were not too far off the mark. While Hong
Kong has continued to mount protests against Beijing, it is only natural that,
nearly 12 years after the handover and two decades after the June 4 debacle,
the city has changed its thinking about the mainland authorities with whom its
fate is now so inextricably linked.
This is not to say that most of Hong Kong's 7 million people have turned their
backs on the movement they once championed. According to a recent poll
conducted by the University of Hong Kong's Public Opinion Program, 61% of the
population still thinks the central government should reverse its verdict on
the student movement as a "counter-revolutionary riot". (The same poll last
year showed only 49% supported reversing the official verdict, again suggesting
that this 20th anniversary year has generated a new wave of interest in and
sympathy for the students.)
In April, University of Hong Kong students voted to remove their student union
president, Ayo Chan Yi-ngok, after he blamed the military crackdown on
"irrational" student leaders.
The release last month of the secretly recorded memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the
Communist Party general secretary who was ousted and placed under house arrest
for opposing Deng's decision to use force against the demonstrators, has also
sparked renewed debate over the June 4 movement. Those memoirs, whose English
title is Prisoner of the State, are unavailable in any language on the
mainland. But they are selling like hotcakes in Hong Kong, where many still
regard Zhao, who died in January of 2005, as a hero. (See
China and catharsis in the words of Zhao, Asia Times Online, May 21)
Despite this revival, however, if you ask the average Hong Kong student about
the complex and tumultuous events of 1989, you are likely to get a very
sketchy, if not downright ignorant, response. That's because some Hong Kong
secondary schools choose to avoid the subject altogether, while many others
give it only a cursory look.
The problem is not that schools are prohibited from studying the crackdown. In
one of the many acts of self-censorship since the handover, they simply choose,
in a bow to Beijing, not to do so. Like the chief executive, history textbooks
used in schools typically refer to the blood spilled on June 4 as an
"incident", granting it only a few sentences of description.
Their limited education aside, a younger generation searching for a political
foothold in Hong Kong could be cowered by reports last month that the city's
most internationally renowned advocate for democracy, Martin Lee Chu-ming,
founder of the Democratic Party, was the target of an assassination plot that
police continue to investigate after the arrest of two suspects.
In April of 2006, the current chairman of the party, Albert Ho Chun-yan, was
attacked by three men wielding baseball bats in broad daylight at a McDonald's
restaurant in the city's crowded Central district. Ho has recovered from his
injuries, and his assailants, plus the self-confessed mastermind of the attack,
have been jailed, but the judge in the case was convinced that the real
ringleader escaped detection.
There is no evidence that mainland authorities had any role in either of these
plots. In fact, the central government would be foolish to turn Hong Kong
democrats into martyrs for their cause.
No matter who is responsible, however, these schemes only serve to bolster an
atmosphere of intimidation in the city. Simply put, it doesn't pay to be a
democrat in Hong Kong, and pro-democracy diehards such as Lee and Ho, while
they may be regarded as heroes by their brethren, are treated as pariahs by the
central government. The 20th anniversary of June 4 has done nothing to change
that.
Indeed, despite Beijing's promise that Hong Kong would remain a free and
autonomous Special Administrative Region of China for at least 50 years after
the handover, aging exiles of Tiananmen such as Wang Dan and Xiang Xiaoji were
refused entry to the city ahead of the anniversary. Danish sculptor Jens
Galschiot, who created the Pillar of Shame statue honoring the victims of the
crackdown that now stands at the University of Hong Kong, was also turned away.
Previously, Galschiot, along with other activists, was barred last year in the
run-up to the Summer Olympic Games, hosted by Beijing, when embarrassing
protests accompanying the ill-fated Olympic torch relay transformed Hong Kong's
supposedly autonomous immigration officials into lackeys of the central
government.
True, last week those same officials opened the city's gates to one Tiananmen
exile, Xiong Yan, once on Beijing's "most wanted" list for his part in the June
4 movement but now a citizen of the United States and a chaplain in the US
Army. Xiong took an active part in the candle-light vigil, telling the swelling
crowd at one point: "Hong Kong is the pride of all Chinese - because you have
people who dare to defend freedom."
But the absence of his banned fellow dissidents weighed heavily on the
occasion.
Beyond the controversies surrounding this week's politically sensitive
anniversary, those who worry about Hong Kong's eroding autonomy are alarmed by
reports that Beijing is encouraging local delegates to the National Committee
of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference to play a greater
role in Hong Kong affairs, which would be a slap in the face of the "one
country, two systems" formula on which the handover was built.
Unfortunately, the past 12 years have been marked by a number of such slaps.
When the Chinese leadership does not like a ruling made by Hong Kong's Court of
Final Appeal - which is supposed to, as the name implies, have the last word on
legal matters in the city - the Standing Committee of the National People's
Congress has stepped in to "reinterpret" the law in question. The committee has
also issued an edict thwarting Hong Kong's progress toward the full democracy
it is guaranteed in its constitution, a document firmly anchored in the rule of
law.
At this point, it seems Hong Kong will morph into more of a faux democracy than
a real one, and its reputation under the rule of law has been dented by the
central government's interventions.
That said, for ordinary people, Hong Kong is as free as any city in the world.
They can go where they want, say what they want and do what they want - as long
as they bring no harm to others. A culture of free speech and orderly civil
disobedience is well established here.
In a political pinch, however, the law can be "reinterpreted", visitors deemed
unfriendly to Beijing can be banned and the horror of Tiananmen can be
dismissed as an "incident".
But Hong Kong's shifting values should surprise no one. The same thing is
happening globally to accommodate the meteoric rise of China, an economic
juggernaut (still growing, albeit not as spectacularly, during the current
downturn) that remains a human-rights disaster. On some days, it truly does
seem that Hong Kong, along with much of the rest of the world, has moved on to
a lamentable place where massacres turn into incidents.
On Thursday night, however, once again the city came up big. Victoria Park was
alight with tragic memories of the young people who needlessly lost their lives
20 years ago. It was a beautiful and special moment repeated nowhere else in
China - a massive act of dissent that was also the deepest form of patriotism.
And that's what Beijing still doesn't understand about Tiananmen, about Hong
Kong and about democracy.
Even Hong Kong's chief executive would have to admit, Thursday night was
something bigger than an incident.
Kent Ewing is a Hong-Kong based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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