New focus for Tiananmen protests?

Ever since the bloody repression of China’s democracy movement in the Tiananmen massacre of 4 June 1989, Hong Kong people have defied the official Chinese line that the event was a counter-revolutionary riot of no significance that should be forgotten, by turning out in their hundreds of thousands in what has become an annual candlelit vigil to remember those who died.

The transformation of the British colony into a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic in 1997did nothing to quench support for the event and by now the Government in Beijing knows that short of sending in the troops it is powerless to prevent it. However, this year’s vigil has come under fire from a growing band of radicals who want to break the links with the mainland altogether.

The hero of this group is an academic, Horace ChinWan-kan, the author of a book which advocates a Singapore-style city-state status for Hong Kong. He says that the Tiananmen protesters’ aim of seeking a reform of the Communist system on the mainland has become irrelevant to the larger issue of a fully free and democratic Hong Kong.

In an interview with the South China Morning Post he called “for a line to be drawn” between Hong Kong and the mainland.

“In those days when Hong Kong people supported the student protests in Beijing, we were free-riding on the hope of a democratic China. Today we must realise Hong Kong’s democracy has to rely on its own people,” Chin said.

The movement came to prominence last year when in a demonstration in front of the Chinese Government liaison office, autonomy supporters waved British colonial-era flags. Since then they have also carried the flag of Taiwan – the breakaway offshore island which Beijing considers a renegade province – at protests.

At the heart of these changes is a growing disillusionment that Beijing will ever waver from its authoritarian one-party style of government. Added to this is a frustration that 16 years after the handover, the promise of a full democracy in Hong Kong has been constantly postponed and is currently just a vague prospect for 2017.

Balanced against the democracy movement are the concerns of many local business interests that the profitable two-way dealings with the mainland could be disrupted and the fears of many ordinary Hong Kongers that a too radical push for greater freedoms could force Beijing into a crackdown that would destroy the city’s vibrant, international lifestyle.

Whatever the outcome of this year’s vigil, it would seem that an increasing number of young Hong Kongers, who have no memory of the massacre itself, are seeing it more as a symbol for change rather than the commemoration of a past atrocity.