Hong Kong police said they arrested 24 people involved in weekend demonstrations to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing: 23 of them were charged with violating the peace, while a 53-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of having obstructed the work of the police. Hong Kong has been a Chinese special administrative region since 1997 and was for a long time the only city in the country where a major annual commemoration for the massacre was held every year: however, for some years now, local authorities have banned and harshly repressed any demonstration that commemorates the event also in Hong Kong, due to the ever more rigid control of the Chinese regime on the territory.
The demonstrations recall what happened on June 4, 1989, when many demonstrators gathered in Tiananmen Square to demand democratic reforms were killed by the country’s army on government orders. The protests in the streets had begun following the death of the reformist communist leader Hu Yaobang, had been going on since April and reflected the concerns of part of the population about the rapid economic changes in the country, corruption and the lack of sufficient freedom of the press and of expression. After days of protests and hesitations by the government on how to deal with the situation, during the night of June 3-4 Chinese army convoys entered Beijing and soldiers fired on people with rifles and tanks, killing some hundreds of people (according to other estimates, thousands).
For decades, China has implemented a widespread repression of any form of protest regarding the event, preventing the holding of demonstrations to commemorate the massacre and exceptionally pervasive censoring of any form of testimony or publication that could recall it, even on the internet . In recent years, demonstrations have also been repressed in Hong Kong, where the Chinese regime has progressively dismantled pro-democracy movements and prohibited commemorations, exploiting security reasons linked to the coronavirus pandemic in a specious way to ban them.
– Read also: The Tiananmen Square massacre is not being commemorated in Hong Kong again this year
