“Yesterday’s Tiananmen, Today’s Hong Kong” – Lessons from the Real Tiananmen Crackdown (Victoria Tin-bor Hui)
The annual candlelight vigil planned for June 4 is banned for the first time since the 1997 handover. In 1989, Hong Kong people marched under the banner “Today’s Tiananmen, Tomorrow’s Hong Kong.” Thirty-one years later, “yesterday’s Tiananmen” has become “today’s Hong Kong.”
For Hongkongers who are pondering over a path forward under Beijing’s national security law, the first step is to fully understand the parallels between then and now.
“Tiananmen” should refer broadly to a national movement rather than narrowly to the bloody crackdown at the iconic Tiananmen Square in China’s capital city. While it is true that the People’s Liberation Army has not rolled out military tanks to Hong Kong’s busy streets, there are, nevertheless, striking similarities with 1989.
The most notable of which is the fomentation of “riots” to justify a brutal repression.
On April 26, 1989, the People’s Daily’s editorial accused the outpouring of grief over the former party secretary Hu Yaobang’s death as a “turmoil” and demanded that “those who smash, loot, and burn must be punished.” This enraged students, sparking more protests. There was in fact no smashing or burning until ordinary people were forced to stop the advance of troops and tanks in the early hours of June 4.
Thirty years later, on June 12, 2019, Beijing began labelling Hong Kong’s anti-extradition protests as “riots”. On that day, tens of thousands protested the legislation that would have allowed for the rendition of anyone in Hong Kong to mainland China. There were in fact no riots, but peaceful demonstrations of 1 million on June 9 and 2 millions on June 16. It was not until August that some protestors turned from umbrellas to firebombs.
Bao Pu, the son of the jailed liberal leader Bao Tong, believed that the escalation of tensions in 1989 was “
a deliberate strategy .” This may well be the case in Hong Kong too.
Beijing long tried to undermine the civil and political liberties enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law: It tried to impose a national security bill in 2003, national education in 2012, and “comprehensive jurisdiction” and pre-screened elections in 2014, before the extradition bill in 2019.
All of Beijing’s previous attempts at undercutting Hong Kong’s freedoms were pushed back by mass peaceful protests. Because it was difficult to repress peaceful protestors, the answer was to incite a violent turn.
To radicalise peaceful demonstrators, the first move was to refuse to make concessions, thereby forcing the opposition to either abandon their demands or to step up their actions. At Tiananmen Square, students escalated by going on a hunger strike. In Hong Kong, the government’s unresponsiveness to multiple million-strong peaceful marches gave rise to the slogan: “It is [you] who taught us that peaceful demonstrations are ineffective.”
As if to reinforce this conviction, the authorities began to increasingly close off nonviolent means of expressing dissent.
The Civil Human Rights Front, an organisation that led peaceful marches without incident since 2002, mobilised the million-strong marches in June and another 1.7-million-strong rally on August 18. Since August, however, the police routinely refused to issue “no-objection notices”– rendering many subsequent protests “unlawful” or “unauthorised” assemblies.
Protestors formed human chains, spontaneously sang “Glory to Hong Kong” across the city, and promoted their cause through public art and “Lennon Walls”. These peaceful displays of solidarity, however, were subject to same risks as other “unlawful assemblies”, and much of the art were destroyed by government agents and counter-protestors. Supporters were arrested by the police or stabbed by pro-Beijing thugs.
Strikes and boycotts, other popular non-violent tactics, also seemed ineffective in Hong Kong. Striking workers, especially Cathay Pacific staff, were quickly dismissed. Pro-democracy businesses were vandalised by thugs and harassed by government agents.
Indeed, the authorities have had little tolerance for such non-violent means of dissent because they are the hallmark of “
color revolutions .” As a Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office spokesman said, the goal of general strikes and class boycotts is “to paralyse the Hong Kong government” and “seize the power for governing the Special Administrative Region.” The Hong Kong Education Secretary Kevin Yeung issued a warning that students in uniform “should not stage, or participate in political activities, including class boycotts, singing songs, chanting slogans, forming human chains or other related activities like distributing flyers promoting political messages.”
In addition to stifling legal and peaceful channels of expression, the authorities launched unprecedented state-sanctioned violence against protesters to provoke radicalisation and to eliminate what Chief Executive Carrie Lam calls “enemies of the people.”
Hong Kong people could not believe how the local police, once Asia’s finest, would decapacitate fellow citizens in front of their eyes. “The other Tiananmens” across China in 1989 can offer clues.
As analysed by journalist
Louisa Lim , Beijing deployed the police rather than the military in Chengdu in 1989. The Chengdu police’s goal was not to disperse crowds, but to “
annihilate ” the movement by beating protestors to death and by ordering hospitals to stop accepting the wounded.
The repression in Hong Kong has echoes of the Chengdu model’s short of outright killing. The Hong Kong police have
beaten protestors with batons, breaking the bones of those already pinned down in direct view of journalists and passersby. The police fired point blank at protestors on a few occasions. Near the besieged Polytechnic University, police vehicles took on a new “
battle tactic ” to ram at high speed into protestors, causing a stampede and severe injuries.
The police also arrested first responders, blocked the path of ambulances, and rounded up suspected protestors at hospitals. Doctors and nurses, who know first-hand the extent of bone fractures and brain injuries, staged sit-ins with the slogan “Hong Kong police attempt to murder Hong Kong citizens.” International observers complained that police operations were “unheard of in civilized societies” and that they systematically violated
international humanitarian norms .
Another aspect of the Chengdu experience is the use of
provocateurs and criminals to set fires to the People’s Market to discredit the movement and provide justification for an all-out repression. In Hong Kong, there is reasonable suspicion that some of the large-scale destruction was committed by officers dressed as protestors who were escorted away rather than arrested by uniformed police.
The Hong Kong police further
colluded with gangsters to beat up protestors, organisers, and journalists alike. The indiscriminate assaults by thugs in Yuen Long on July 21 and after triggered vigilante justice.
Driven by both the closing of legal dissent and the extremity of regime brutality, protestors increasingly turned to violent escalation. This, in turn, further opened up the opportunity for agent provocateurs to flame the “riots,” even “terrorist acts.” As images of black-clad people emerged from vandalised shops and train stations, it was difficult to sort out who was a protester and who was in disguise.
Then, Beijing deployed a narrative of smashing and burning to justify a heavy crackdown. Today, Beijing has likewise manufactured violent reactions to justify extreme measures to “stop the violence and end the turmoil.”
The only difference between Tiananmen then and “Tiananmen 2.0” now is international support. In 1989, international sanctions against Beijing came only after a bloody massacre. In 2019, the U.S. Congress tabled, debated and passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in the face of heightening police brutality. It might not be sheer coincidences that the Chief Executive Carrie Lam agreed to suspend the extradition bill on June 15 after Senator Marco Rubio re-tabled the Act on June 13, that she announced to withdraw the bill on September 4 when the Congress held a hearing on U.S.-China relations, and that the District Council election was not delayed or canceled when the Act was set to pass.
Beijing did not take such setbacks lightly. It decided to impose a state-level national security law to “effectively prevent, stop and punish” any conduct involving secession, subversive acts, terrorist activities, and foreign interference. The world has responded with not just strong condemnations, but also decertification of Hong Kong’s autonomous status.
China has achieved meteoric rise through integration with the world after the last Tiananmen crackdown. “Tiananmen 2.0” may well bring that chapter to a close.
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