HONG KONG — In the one small patch of China that nurtures memories the Communist Party wants buried, tens of thousands gathered Saturday night in Hong Kong to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, galvanized in their orderly outrage by China’s current crackdown on dissent, the most sweeping in two decades.
Unlike on the Chinese mainland, where public discussion of the Tiananmen killings is taboo, this former British colony has made remembrance of the military assault on student protesters in Beijing an emblem of both its own freedoms and its Chinese patriotism.
“I came to show that what happened won’t be forgotten,” said Dickson Lau, a 26-year-old teacher. “I’m a patriot.”
Though governed by Britain until 1997, Hong Kong has a history of supporting political reform in China that dates back to the 1911 revolution, in which the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, was overthrown.
Hong Kong has mourned the crushing of the Tiananmen student movement each year since 1989 with a candlelight vigil. Saturday’s commemoration in Victoria Park was one of the biggest in recent years, said Lee Cheuk-Yan, chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, one of the organizers.
In Beijing, authorities marked the June 4 anniversary by rounding up yet more of their critics, continuing an assault on dissent that activists say is the harshest since the immediate aftermath of the 1989 bloodshed. China also repeated its oft-stated position that the case is closed on the events of 1989. “A clear conclusion has already been made concerning the political turmoil that happened in the late 1980s,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
