Why Hong Kong’s student leaders are abandoning June 4 vigil
A look at the deep divide between elder activists championing the city’s annual commemoration of the Tiananmen crackdown and their younger counterparts
Wearing a headband with the words “never call a truce”, Alex Chow Yong-kang led more than 20 members of the Hong Kong Federation of Students to the lit stage in Victoria Park. Before a shimmering sea of candles, he delivered an evocative speech on the importance of remembering the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
It was June 4, 2014, at the annual candlelight vigil held in Hong Kong each year, well before the unprecedented 79-day pro-democracy Umbrella Movement sit-ins the following September that Chow co-led.
“We, a group of university students, believe that people who refuse to forget about the crackdown all share the same belief - to bring democracy and freedom to this piece of land,” Chow told the crowd.
“Hongkongers now are just like the Chinese citizens in 1989. Beijing students exercised civil disobedience to occupy Tiananmen Square. Don’t they share the same belief as Hongkongers today who float the idea of Occupy Central? Aren’t we all targeting the same regime?”
No-one listening to Chow in the crowd would have expected then that would be the last time the federation, the city’s oldest and largest student group, would appear on the stage of the world’s largest annual commemoration of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Amid the rise of localist sentiments in the wake of the Occupy Movement, the federation decided last year not to attend the candlelight vigil organised by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China.