Hong Kong Police Arrest Six for Honoring Victims of Tiananmen Square Massacre

Hong Kong police arrested six people for “public order offenses” on Saturday, the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The island’s Beijing-controlled government used the Wuhan coronavirus as an excuse to cancel Hong Kong’s world-famous vigils for the Tiananmen victims three years ago, and then used the tyrannical “national security law” to ensure the vigils would never return.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Monday the detainees were “five men and one woman, aged 19-80.” They were arrested after the police increased patrols in the areas of Hong Kong where Tiananmen vigils were traditionally held and warned the public not to try staging any “personal memorials.”

The detainees were charged with “inciting others to take part in an illegal assembly,” “possessing an offensive weapon,” and “obstructing police officers in the course of the duties.”

Even after breaking up the groups that organized Tiananmen vigils for three decades and shutting down Victoria Park, which was once filled with tens of thousands of candle-bearing mourners, the Communist-controlled island government decided to increase police patrols around the park and Causeway Bay on Saturday. The police were still “stopping passers-by for questioning” on Sunday after Victoria Park reopened.

Hundreds of police flooded shopping districts in Hong Kong on Saturday and blocked access to Victoria Park, while citizens moved quietly around the edges of the park and made a few gestures of defiance, such as one pro-democracy access who was arrested for wearing a face mask that said “Commemorating June 4th.”

Several dozen people switched on their cell phone flashlights – only to be harassed by police and ordered to turn them off. The symbolism of an evil so miserable that it literally fears the smallest of lights was not lost on pro-democracy activists, who vowed to keep the memory of the Tiananmen victims alive.

Western diplomats used their immunity to display forbidden remembrance candles in their windows or share iconic candle images online. Tiananmen memorials were quite a bit more lively beyond the reach of Beijing’s cowardly tyrants, as RFA reported:

Large numbers of Hongkongers in exile turned out to mark the massacre in London at the weekend, lighting candles and writing messages of commemoration, including outside the Chinese Embassy, where protesters mock-charged the building with paper effigies of tanks, only to be pushed back by police.

Protesters held up photos of political prisoners jailed in Hong Kong under a draconian national security law imposed on the city by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, which called for universal suffrage and greater official accountability, as well as opposing plans to allow extradition to mainland China.

Some Hong Kong expatriates told RFA they feared the Chinese Communist Party could use the family they left back home as hostages, a technique often used to silence mainland Chinese who live or travel abroad.

An enterprising band of university students spent last week using 3D printers to make tiny replicas of the “Goddess of Democracy” – a statue beloved by the student activists of 1989 that resembles the American Statue of Liberty – and hiding them all over the University of Hong Kong campus. The organizers then encouraged other students to scour the campus and find all of the hidden statuettes.

The full-sized Goddess of Democracy that once stood at the university was removed by the Communists at roughly the same time as the famed Pillar of Shame, a statue cast in the memory of the Tiananmen dead. Just as the artist who created the Pillar of Shame, Jens Galschiot, authorized replicas of varying size to be constructed around the world after the original was vandalized, sculptor Chen Weiming gave his blessing to the students who made the little copies of his Goddess of Democracy statue.