China: Hong Kong universities remove more Tiananmen memorials

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Statue "Goddess of Democracy": removed overnight

Photo: Kin Cheung / AP

It was a purge with an announcement: construction workers had already dismantled a statue at Hong Kong University (HKU) on Thursday.

The eight-meter-high "Pillar of Shame" was reminiscent of the violent crackdown on the democracy protests on Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989 and has been on the HKU campus since 1997.

Two more Hong Kong universities have now followed suit and have removed statues commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen massacre.

The statue "Goddess of Democracy" was dismantled on the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

The six-meter-high sculpture by artist Chen Weiming was a replica of a giant statue that students had erected in Tiananmen Square.

It was an important symbol for Hong Kong's democracy movement.

Around the same time, the Lingnan University of Hong Kong had a relief statue created by Chen removed and a wall painted with a picture of the "goddess of democracy."

Because of the Christmas break, the campus was almost deserted.

"Like a thief in the night"

Chen, who lives in the US, expressed "regret and anger" at the removal of his works.

The behavior of the Hong Kong universities is "illegal and unreasonable".

"You acted like a thief that night," Chen told the AFP news agency.

"That was the opposite of clean and honest."

The CUHK said it removed the "unauthorized statue" after an internal review.

Lingnan University also said it removed the Reflief after "reviewing and evaluating items on campus that could pose legal and security risks to the university."

China's hardship against critics

In June 1989, the Chinese army violently suppressed student protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. How many people were killed in the process is still unclear. For decades, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was the only place in China where remembrance of the dead was tolerated. After months of mass protests in 2019 against the growing influence of Beijing, the authorities are now acting with increasing severity against critics in the economic metropolis. In July 2020, the so-called Security Act came into force: it allows the authorities to take draconian cracks against all activities that they believe threaten the national security of China.

Numerous leaders of the opposition have since been arrested or went into exile.

The authorities said that commemorative events for the events in Tiananmen Square would also be considered "subversive" and punished.

AFP / rai