(Vancouver) Activists in Canada say Hong Kong’s crackdown on commemorations of the Tiananmen Square massacre has breathed new vigor and meaning into vigils in diaspora communities.
The Vancouver Democratic Movement Society says it had to move its annual June 4 candlelight vigil from outside the Chinese consulate to downtown’s David Lam Park to accommodate more people over the two last years.
Society President Mabel Tung announced that the event would be held in the park again on the 35th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, in which hundreds or even thousands of people were killed by Chinese troops.
Tung said the young protesters are motivated by the recent crackdown on dissident movements in Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Toronto and Vancouver did not respond to a request for comment.
Hong Kong was for decades the global center of June 4 commemorations, with crowds sometimes exceeding 100,000 people at an annual vigil before the organizations were disbanded in 2021 as the government ended public demonstrations. ‘opposition.
Reactivity is strong in the face of any mention or demonstrations linked to June 4. A social media video, filmed in Hong Kong on Tuesday, shows an elderly man surrounded by police and taken away as he silently traced the Chinese characters eight, nine, six and four in the air with his hand – an obvious reference to the date.
Among the few visible demonstrators are foreign diplomats.
Candles adorned the windows of the U.S. consulate, while the consuls general of Germany and the Netherlands joined a representative from the European Union office in Hong Kong to stroll through Victoria Park, where once stood the mass vigil.
Tung notes that young protesters may not have direct memories of the massacre.
However, she reports that some Hong Kongers who moved to Canada in recent years have been motivated to participate in June 4 vigils by repression in their hometowns since the Umbrella Movement pro-democracy protests of 2014. New mass protests took place in 2019, which triggered a new wave of repression, including the introduction of a sweeping national security law.
“I talked about it briefly [with a participant],” Ms. Tung said. She arrived just a year ago. She said that in Hong Kong she never went to any of the candlelight vigils at Victoria Park, but she started coming to our candlelight vigil last year. »
“Her reasoning is that because she couldn’t do it in Hong Kong now, she loves doing it to say to the Chinese Communist Party, ‘I still have my freedom here.’ »
In Toronto, protesters are also planning a candlelight vigil and march from the Chinese consulate to the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, ending at the University of Toronto.
Activist Cherie Wong, who has lived in Canada and Hong Kong, was born after 1989 but says her parents took her to the Victoria Park vigil every year when she was a child.
“I think we stand on the shoulders of the activists who came before us,” Wong says.
“For as long as I can remember, my family has always talked about the Tiananmen students and the Chinese students who stood up to demand democracy in China as people who led the way despite repression and violence. »
“And I think we share that sentiment, that we carry their work and we stand on their shoulders to build on the Umbrella Movement, to build on the activist movement of 2016, to build on what happened in 2019.”
