In the past three days, the Chinese regime has debunked and dismantled all monuments and commemorative marks of the Tiananmen massacre, confirming the lockdown since the passage of the National Security Law.
The great erasure. Hong Kong debunked its last monuments in memory of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, marking the disappearance of all public commemoration on Chinese soil. The campaign is part of an increasingly intense crackdown on freedoms once enjoyed by the former British colony.
On the night of Wednesday to Thursday, the University of Hong Kong (HKU) withdrew from its campus the Pillar of shame, a statue erected more than twenty years ago to commemorate the victims of the massacre perpetrated by the Chinese regime on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square from June 4, 1989.
As with a crime scene, the operation was carried out out of sight. The statue was covered with large white sheets and a few dozen pots of Christmas flowers were neatly arranged all around, the better to hide it from the eyes of curious visitors. Unable to see the dismantling, some students spent the night listening to the sounds of the jackhammers unsealing the statue: “This helplessness. This rage. It’s unbearable, and it makes me nauseous. “ says Marcus, a 19-year-old student at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The day is breaking, he gazes in amazement at the empty space: “It’s a nightmare we won’t wake up from.” The author of the work, the Danish Jens Galschiøt, said to himself “shocked”.
Tangled bodies
Named Pillar of Shame (“Pillar of shame”), the statue represented an arrow of fifty bodies tangled and twisted in pain. If there is no official figure, the Tiananmen massacre would have caused the deaths of thousands of protesters. Wang Dan, one of the former student leaders of the movement living in the United States today, denounced on Facebook “A despicable act to try to erase this chapter of history stained with blood”. In the middle of the following night, on Christmas Eve, two more works of art were quietly removed: a sculpture at Lingnan University, and the Goddess of democracy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), a replica of the statue erected in 1989 by protesters in Beijing.
Hong Kong remained the only place in China where the memory of the massacre was tolerated. It was commemorated en masse for three decades, until this year, when, for the second time in a row, the gathering was banned on health grounds. Since the enactment of a national security law last year, China has been busy reshaping the city in its own image and setting out to rewrite history there. All associations commemorating the massacre have become the targets of unprecedented repression. References to the massacre have been removed from school books. In early December, Jimmy Lai and seven other activists were sentenced to prison terms for participating in the prohibited vigil on June 4, 2020. In September, the organizers of the vigil were indicted for “Incitement to subversion” and the museum which collects the archives of the searched 1989 movement.
Large empty square
A fourth-year CUHK student from mainland China, preferring to be called under the pseudonym Sara, recounts coming to Hong Kong for “Study China freely”. It was in Hong Kong that she discovered the existence of the Tiananmen Massacre, a subject censored on the mainland: “Here, I no longer felt the immense gap between me and the rest of the world”, she adds. On the large square left empty by the disappearance of the Goddess of democracy, she is one of ten students who organize a mini-evening: “You can feel the atmosphere here. Everything has just changed. It’s not just a statue. It is the fruit of our determination, our history and our heritage which are disappearing. ”
The students, some in tears, draw sketches of the statue and distribute leaflets with the phrase written on it. “Have you seen her?” Where “Bring her back”. Others placed chrysanthemums, a traditional Chinese symbol of mourning, lit candles and played Bloodstained Glory, the flagship song of the traditional evenings in memory of Tiananmen.
“This feeling of mourning, the dispossession of my autonomy, it’s terrifying. But in China, I had never felt it, because there is no such thing as freedom ”, Sara says. “What I hope is that it will be remembered.”