Oddities were aplenty at the Victoria Park on the eve of and on June 4 as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown marked its 37th anniversary last Thursday. As Hong Kong was hit by extreme hot weather, more weird phenomena under acute political climate surfaced.

Patriotism education of a different kind

For the fourth year in a row, the six football fields where tens of thousands of people gathered as night fell on June 4 to mourn the deaths of the bloodshed from 1990 until 2020 had been booked for a carnival held by local patriotic groups.

Straddling June 4 from June 3 to June 7, the patriotic “Hometown Market” saw an array of associations of natives of mainland provinces, cities and towns in Hong Kong, selling food and snacks from their hometowns.

On June 3, top government officials including acting Chief Executive Eric Chan and security chief Chris Tang and a fleet of 60 Legislative Council members led by President Starry Lee showed up to show support to the patriotic carnival. A deputy director of the central government’s Liaison Office also paid a visit on the same day.

Lee lauded the carnival as the best ground for patriotism education.

The same place where the annual June 4 candle light vigil was held for more than 30 years after 1989 was ironically a place for many young parents to bring their children to attend the commemoration for them to know what happened at and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Call it patriotism education of a different kind.

Showcase of “one country, two systems”

Ignited by the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang in April 1989, the outburst of spontaneous memorial activities of university students in Beijing sparked calls for democracy, press freedom and clean government, among others. It was brought to a tragic end after tanks rolled into the city.

The June 4 killings dealt a heavy blow to the open and reform drive spearheaded by the then patriarch Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. Anxious to stop ultra-conservatives from reversing the course of reform, Deng paid the landmark “southern tour” in 1992 giving fresh impetus to his open door policy. The rest is history.

Driven by love for their nation, anxieties about the post-1997 fate and hopes for freedom and democracy, Hong Kong people took to the streets to show their support and sympathy for the Beijing students.

On every June 4 evening after 1989, they held up candles paying tribute to the victims and rekindling hopes for a China with freedom, democracy and rule of law.

That Hong Kong had continued to be a place where commemoration of June 4, a taboo in the mainland, has been seen as a showcase of “one country, two systems” policy.

A barometer

37 years on, China has become the world’s second superpower in terms of economic and political influence. Its record in human rights, rule of law, however, is still a distance from the expectations of many people in Hong Kong and the West.

Scenes of the annual candle light vigil at Victoria Park faded into history beginning from 2021 after the national security law took effect in July 2020.

The heavy presence of uniformed and plain-cloth police officers and anti-riots vehicles inside and outside the park on June 3 and June 4 since 2021 has emerged as a grim reminder to people who chose not to forget June 4. This year is no exception, but only with more oddities.

Like the previous years, there was less coverage of the scenes at Victoria Park by the mainstream media, in particular the TV and radio broadcasters. The swift stop-and-search operation by police officers seems to have worked. Based on reports on social media, there were less quiet-and-subtle mourners in the park.

Pictures and reports of a new phenomenon, dubbed by online media as “park-benchers gang”, were widely circulated.

In a rare scene, more than 20 park benches had been continuously occupied by people who apparently had visited the “Hometown Market” carnival. Some held mainland-made bottled water. A picture showed a park-goer occupying one more seat with a one-metre height doll bear as he seemed to be keeping an eye on a suspected mourner on the same bench.

A newspaper report said the mobile phone of a “park-bencher” showed a WeChat group with a heading read as “June 3 to June 7 security guard at Victoria Park”. The “park-benchers gang” disappeared by 11 pm.

The June 4 candle light vigil at Victoria Park had been seen as a barometer showing the temperature of mainland-Hong Kong relations. Scenes of the park on June 4 and their disappearance from major mainstream media featured on June 4 this year spoke a lot of the city’s political atmosphere.

▌ [At Large] About the Author

Chris Yeung is a veteran journalist, a founder and chief writer of the now-disbanded CitizenNews; he now runs a daily news commentary channel on Youtube. He had formerly worked with the South China Morning Post and the Hong Kong Economic Journal.