In the afternoon on the 32nd anniversary of the June 4 incident, the police cordoned off Victoria Park to prohibit citizens from mourning for it in the park. Worse still, all the cross-harbor tunnels that are open to all traffic as usual even when typhoon signal No. 8 is hoisted were like closed off by the police. To stop citizens from lighting up candles in mourning for the incident by fair means or foul so as to prevent a sea of candlelights from reappearing in Victoria Park, such tight security, not much different from imposing a curfew, is definitely not a necessity for fighting the epidemic, but pursuing political maneuver

The Hong Kong government who made a U-turn on its tolerant attitude towards it that had been taken for 30 years must have been given a political command to put a ban on every single burning candle or public mourning activity in Victoria Park or any public place, which was a move as effective as telling the world that “one country, two systems” is already obsolete, and Hong Kong is on a par with any city on the mainland.

June 4 is the struggle of memory against forgetting. What the authorities in Beijing are most desirous of is that Hong Kong people and the entire world have forgotten this sanguinary massacre. Had the Hong Kong government not been so neurotic as to impose a curfew that made Hong Kong the city with strictest security, even way beyond that in Beijing, all over the globe on June 4, Hong Kong would not have hit the headlines around the world again. Had the authorities maintained business-as-usual mentality towards citizens taking part in a mourning assembly in Victoria Park and a sea of candlelights which would have been the same as the ones in the past and would even be getting smaller in size year by year, it would not have been that newsworthy.

That the government, however, stopped citizens from mourning for the incident with a high hand instigated a lot of people to fight against it, and be eager to tell their offspring the history of June 4. How can it fade from people’s memory? The mainstream media will even pay closer attention to it!

In fact, everybody had known pretty well that 7,000 police offices out on duty to stop citizens from participating in a mourning activity was not the way to wipe the memory out. On the contrary, it would just produce the opposite of the desired outcome, inciting more people to resist. That the government still went for it showed palpably that it had to report what it did in the line of duty to the ruling class in Beijing. Some people are simply intolerant of even a single glaring candlelight anywhere in China.

(Poon Siu-to, veteran journalist)

This article is translated from Chinese by Apple Daily.

Click here for Chinese version

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