Hong Kong’s Tiananmen vigil: “Not forgotten, not forgiven”

 
They crowds just kept coming... pouring into Hong Kong’s Victoria Park from every direction. “200,000 in 6/4 [June 4, 1989] vigil” is the front page headline in Apple Daily. Ariel photographs show an endless blanket of sparkling lights stretching across the park and outwards. The demonstration area is the size of six soccer pitches and these were packed to capacity, with around 150,000 people. But an estimated 50,000 people could not get into the park and blocked the roads in every direction. The 200m walk from Tin Hua MTR station took about half an hour. The organisers, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, planned for a huge event, but even they say they fell short, running out of candles - they ‘only’ had 120,000.

 

“The people have not forgotten” boomed the South China Morning Post’s headline. And the mood of the crowd also shows that the crimes of the Chinese regime are not forgiven either. Among the speakers at the mass garthering was Ding Zilin, on a pre-recorded video smuggled out of mainland China. Ding is spokesperson for the Tiananmen Mothers, campaigning for justice over the massacre. Her seventeen year-old son was shot dead by the army on June 4 1989. She is currently barred by police from leaving her home during the anniversary.

Thursday’s mastodon demonstration was extremely important as a comment on political trends throughout China, not just in the autonomous region of Hong Kong. The ‘communist’ dictatorship in Beijing has tried its utmost to obliterate the bloody memory of 1989, a movement that pushed it to the very edge of survival, and the ferocious military response by Deng Xiaopiing and the party elders. Attempts to mark this occasion inside China are firmly suppressed. Members of the Tiananmen Mothers campaign group, who lost children and relatives in the massacre, have this year been prevented from visiting shrines to their dead children on June 4. A campaign on the internet urging students and workers to wear white as a mark of remembrance has produced a hysterical official reaction. Companies have been told not to allow their staff to wear white. In Shanghai, the local TV station has instructed its news presenters they can’t appear in anything white for the next two weeks!

 
Big setback for Beijing’s dictators
 
With sophisticated U.S. made internet blocking programmes, sold to the Chinese police by multinationals such as Microsoft, all mention of Tiananmen and “6/4” has been purged from cyberspace. Yet despite the regime’s hi-tech despotism, millions of youth in mainland China are digging deep in order to discover the truth about the missed revolution of 1989. In this sense, the Hong Kong vigil opens a new chapter also in mainland politics: it will undoubtedly embolden and inspire even more especially of the younger generation to challenge the regime. Despite a virtual freeze on issuing visas to Hong Kong at the time of the anniversary, an estimated 2,000 mainlanders took part in the Hong Kong vigil, planning their journey a long time ago. Without the government’s harassment and interference, tens of thousands would have followed suit.

The turnout in Hong Kong has delivered a defeat and an acute embarrassment to the Chinese regime and their apologist Hong Kong sub-branch in the person of Chief Executive Donald Tsang. Their line - that the 1989 ‘incident’ (they deny the massacre) was necessary to launch China on its 20 year curve of high growth - seemed to have won acceptance among more and more people. But this was a misleading impression, reflecting the views of the top layers in society: business people, politicians, foreign diplomats, newspaper editors etc. These privileged layers are those whose voices are heard most. It is on massive demonstrations like the June 4 anniversary that the masses get a rare chance to raise their voices or at least ‘stand up and be counted’. The massive response in Hong Kong, a city that has benefited in economic terms from the China boom, shows that the revulsion of the masses at the 1989 massacre and the continuation of one-party authoritarian rule has not lessened over the years. On the contrary, as many commentators point out in the Hong Kong press, a new generation have awakened to “6/4” and the anti-authoritarian ideals it encapsulates. The composition of last night’s vigil was extremely youthful, including many thousands who were not born in 1989.

 
CWI showed the workers’ role, and alternative
 
CWI comrades and supporters distributed over 2,000 leaflets (read it here). Our new book, Tiananmen 1989 - Seven Weeks that Shook the World, explains the role of the working class in the mass movement of 1989, a factor of immense importance that is often overlooked (the students were the first to struggle, but in the latter days of the movement it was workers that played an increasingly dominant role). In our material we explain that workers’ struggle, especially in China today, is the key to changing society. Linked to this fact, we explain that the capitalist market, while it has recreated ‘blood-and-sweat’ factories, child labour, mass unemployment and other maladies, has not delivered democratic change in China.

 
Once again the CWI/chinaworker.info stall drew enormous interest on June 4, with many Hong Kong youth and even old-timers coming forward and saying “thank you for what you are doing”. The stall’s collection box was full at the end of the evening with the sum of 12,951 Hong Kong dollars (US$1,670), towards supporting workers’ struggle and democratic rights. CWI comrades sold all but one “6/4” tee-shirt (190 tee-shirts sold in two weeks) and 50 copies of the new Tiananmen book, plus more than 20 other books. Perhaps even more impressive is the support and interest shown by mainland Chinese. Despite the police block, the new book has circulated to mainland readers in electronic form and received some very encouraging responses. Just recently, chinaworker.info received the following mail from one of our mainland readers: “Thank you! I support you. I am 40 today, but as a 20 year-old I was one of the Tiananmen hunger strikers.”