Hong Kong smothers dissent ahead of the Tiananmen anniversary
Data show the extent to which repression has grown
FOR 30 YEARS Hong Kong held the world’s biggest vigil for the Tiananmen Square massacre. As many as 180,000 people would gather to light candles in Victoria Park to remember June 4th 1989, when China’s army brought a bloody end to weeks of peaceful pro-democracy protests in Beijing. (China has never put a figure on the number who died in what it terms a counter-revolutionary incident.) Hong Kong’s vigils became a symbol of defiance of mainland authority and an ardent evocation of the city’s independence. “It was magnificent,” says one resident. “We wanted to make [the massacre] known, not just in Hong Kong, but throughout the world.”
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