Eshin Direct

For most of you in Hong Kong and China, you’ll know that June 4th marks the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre. My readers outside of Hong Kong may not be so aware of that fact since for the majority of people in the world the anniversary of this incident goes unnoticed except with a minor segment on a news channel or something.

The world, of course, knows about Tienanmen Square and what happened there. I was only a kid at the time when the images dominated our TV screens in the UK. For me, it was wrong. I watched with admiration the incident with the sole protester and the column of tanks. It represented the best in humanity – the desire to stand up and lay down ones life for your ideals, and the desire not to inflict harm on your own people. And then it all went wrong somehow. The admiration went to shock and horror. The incident was quite personal for me since it was one which fostered my belief that a nation’s military is there to defend those who cannot defend themselves. Opening fire on your own citizens, your own people, is perhaps the worst situation a soldier can be put in.

Anyway, I figured that this year it would be worth my while to go down to the candle light vigil they were holding in Victoria Park. This is partly driven by my possibly imminent departure from Hong Kong but also with recent political decisions from China, the mood in Hong Kong has a pro-democracy charge about it. I’m not one that’s hot on democracy as most of you will know but at the same time, I’m curious to see the other side of the equation too.

One overriding factor also was that the news report I watched suggested that the Chinese government fails to acknowledge in any way what happened at Tienanmen Square. This is a mistake on the part of the Chinese government but hardly surprising since most nations aren’t in the habit of marking down armed and violent suppression of their own citizens. When, by estimates, one thousand of your citizens go missing or are killed because your troops opened fire, some acknowledgment of the fact should be noted. Even more so since the world’s cameras were running at the time although the Chinese government probably doesn’t care since the suppression of information is designed to keep the interior ignorant rather than pander to outside wishes. So I was eager to gauge the Hong Kong feeling on the matter.

Pretty much everything on Hong Kong Island was running normally for a Friday night. One would almost not mark the incident if you were not aware of it. Most people I know, didn’t mark it in any way. I went to the event not feeling any awareness of it and I left the event not feeling any awareness of it. Which I found a little sad. I had a party planned for that night and although I had to cancel it for business reasons, I did feel a little uncomfortable with organizing it on that day when I found it out it was the anniversary.

The candle light vigil was powerful¹.

1. This is as far as I got to on this post. Published after four years, I really can’t remember what my feelings were after this event anymore. I hardly remember it [↩]

Tags: china, Hong Kong, massacre, Political Thoughts, politics, protest