This year marked the 34th anniversary of the June 4th incident, a 1989 student-led demonstration in China that resulted in bloody suppression and massacre. Since then, the annual June 4th candlelight vigil has been part of Hong Kong’s history until 2020, when the national security law banned such national security-threatening activities. However, with the ongoing exodus of Hongkongers, the candlelight of June 4 followed their footsteps and spread globally.
This year, I accepted invitations to make recorded speeches on June 4 for two UK cities. This may make me look like an activist, though I did not attend the June 4th vigil every year when I was in Hong Kong.
History is always paradoxical. Suppression may bring even more remembrance events, which applies to Hong Kong, where mourning activities are officially banned. The government sent an army of police to ensure there were no candlelights in Victoria Park, where the vigil had been held since 1990. However, Hongkongers still paid tribute in various ways—a picture of candlelight on smartphones, electronic candles in hand, wearing yellow masks, and posters in bags as a sign of silent protest, all at the risk of being arrested.
What happened on this “sensitive day” went far beyond this. Performance artists walking around the Park were searched and taken away without explanation. A lamppost marked with the number FA8964 was fenced off. A candle poster outside a provision store run by a pro-democracy ex-councillor was seized by the police on the ground of “inciting mourning.” The same racing car, with the registration number US8964, went around the Park both last year and this year: last time, the driver was advised to leave, and this time the car was towed away.
According to the police, 23 were arrested or taken away for alleged “breach of the peace,” a charge seldom used before. In its official Twitter, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said that it was ‘alarmed’ by reports of June 4th-related detentions in Hong Kong, and it urged the authorities to ‘fully abide’ by obligations under the International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights. Hong Kong’s Security Bureau strongly opposed and condemned OHCHR’s ‘confounding and smearing remarks.’
The deprivation of the right to mourn for the June 4th martyrs is an unmistakable sign of the deterioration of Hong Kong’s social and political situation. In turn, the rights of the other social groups will be more challenging to advance, which pro-establishment legislator Junius Ho Kwan-yiu openly denounces as a violation of China’s tradition.
This reminds me of a recent visit to the People’s History Museum in Manchester, UK. Its collection covers the two centuries of human rights history in Britain, such as Chartism, suffrage movements for men and women, and the communist labor movement.
Now the museum has a special exhibition on the history of disabled people’s activism, entitled “Nothing about Us without Us,” a slogan that no policy should be decided without the participation of members affected by that policy. Two pieces of information in the exhibition drew my attention. First, the UK’s record on human rights for disabled people was condemned by the United Nations in 2017. Unlike Hong Kong’s severe reaction to the OHCHR, the UK government “welcomed” the UN’s report as an opportunity to conduct a “constructive discussion” on advancing the human rights of disabled people.
Second, in 2022, the British Sign Language Act was passed, making the language an official one on par with Welsh in Wales and Gaelic and Scots in Scotland.
The government has to legislate the promotion of its use. This move will promote inclusivity and accessibility for the deaf community, ensuring that they will have equal access to information, employment, and public services.
This exhibition made me believe that only a well-founded democracy will warrant improving the human rights of minor social groups.
How willing can a regime be to improve human rights if it does not care about the concerns of the United Nations and if it practices the Maoist philosophy of “struggling against the sky with endless joy” every day? The answer is quite apparent.
