Police question a local journalist at Victoria Park in the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong, on June 2, the venue where Hong Kong people traditionally gathered annually to mourn the victims of China's Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images
Police in Hong Kong have threatened to arrest anyone at public gatherings marking Sunday’s anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Hundreds of people were killed when the Chinese military cracked down on pro-democracy protests in early June, 1989, ending any lingering hopes for political liberalization in China. For decades afterward, Hong Kong was the only place on Chinese soil where major commemorations of the massacre were held, with tens of thousands gathering annually in the city’s Victoria Park for candlelight vigils.
Since Beijing imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong in 2020, after anti-government protests, authorities have tried to block any remembrance, first on pandemic grounds and now with threats of arrest.
Speaking Friday, police Senior Superintendent Liauw Ka-kei said anyone going to the park on Sunday for “genuine” purposes would be fine, but “I have to stress that if you are staying together with a group of people at the same place at the same time and with a common purpose to express certain views,” that could constitute an unauthorized assembly “or even more serious offences.”
“Do not try to test the boundaries or our determination and commitment in enforcing the law in this operation,” he said.
Under Hong Kong’s public order ordinance, anyone convicted of taking part in an unauthorized assembly can face between three and five years in prison.
In the past, police gave permission for mass gatherings in Victoria Park for June 4 and even facilitated them by providing crowd control. But since the introduction of the national security law, rallies of any kind have been few and far between in Hong Kong, and when they do occur, police have imposed tight limits on the number of people who can participate and have threatened organizers with prosecution if anyone does anything in breach of the security law.
That law came into force several weeks after the 2020 anniversary, and despite pandemic restrictions and police warnings, about 20,000 showed up in Victoria Park. Several prominent activists, including Jimmy Lai, publisher of the now-defunct pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily, were later arrested and charged with unauthorized assembly.
In the years since, a heavy police presence has prevented any major public gathering, and with coronavirus restrictions now lifted, the authorities are not taking any chances this weekend. According to local media, about 5,000 officers – including members of the force’s counterterrorism squad – will be deployed to Victoria Park and other parts of the city starting Saturday.
The park itself has been booked for a carnival organized by pro-Beijing groups. According to Chinese state media, the event will “celebrate the 26th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” That anniversary is in July.
The Hong Kong government has refused to say whether the act of commemorating June 4 is itself illegal. Speaking this week, Chief Executive John Lee said merely that “everybody should act in accordance with the law and think of what they do, so as to be ready to face the consequences.”
His ministers have even skirted mention of the event, with security chief Chris Tang warning of potential disruption around a “very special occasion.”
Hong Kongers are in little doubt as to the potential repercussions, however. Catholic churches, which had previously conducted remembrance masses on June 4, will not do so this year, the diocese said this month. Organizers of an unrelated documentary screening booked for Sunday said they had been forced to cancel the event after movie theatres pulled out, giving in to pressure from unidentified “industry representatives.”
As space has shrunk in Hong Kong for commemorating June 4, events overseas have grown, with long-standing rallies in Toronto, Vancouver and cities in Britain and U.S. taking on greater importance. Speaking to The Globe and Mail last year, Toronto organizer Cheuk Kwan said that, just like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square massacre is a global event, so “it is up to all of us to carry the burden of remembering.”
This week saw the opening of a new museum in New York dedicated to the massacre, the only such permanent exhibition in the world, after the 2021 closure of a similar museum in Hong Kong.
Former Tiananmen student leader Zhou Fengsuo, one of the museum’s curators, said he hoped it could be a place where the “hope for a free China” lives on.
“Because there is a hope,” Mr. Zhou told a news conference. “No matter what kind of defeat there was, and how much struggle we had to go through, this dream lives here.”
With a file from Reuters.
James Griffiths