How Lennon Walls and human chains link Hong Kong’s protesters to cold war Europe
- ‘Leaderless resistance’ to controversial extradition law looks to 1980s Prague and the Baltic states for creative and peaceful means of dissent
- Analysts say Eastern Europe’s long memory of communist rule explains antipathy felt in countries like Lithuania and Czech Republic towards Beijing’s tactics
Decades after the struggle against Soviet rule in Central and Eastern Europe reached its climax, Hong Kong’s protest movement is drawing inspiration from the people who helped bring Soviet rule to an end.
Thirty years after a wave of peaceful protests proved the last straw for communist rule in Eastern Europe and rattled the Communist Party of China so badly it sent troops to crack down on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, support for Hong Kong’s protests has been strong in the former Soviet bloc.
In Hong Kong, after three months of demonstrations, arrests and clashes between protesters and police, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor this week formally moved to withdraw the extradition bill that sparked mass opposition.
While many of the city’s leaderless protesters took inspiration from the Occupy campaigns of 2014, the colourful mosaics of handwritten protest notes that sprang up on walls across the city recalled an era that had passed before many of the demonstrators were born.
These so-called Lennon Walls first appeared in Prague in December 1980 after the murder of John Lennon and evolved into a forum for protests in communist-ruled Czechoslovakia.
“It is very easy for people in Central and Eastern Europe to see Hong Kong’s struggle as striving for democracy [with] small Hong Kong standing against a great communist power,” said Richard Turcsanyi, a researcher at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies at Palacky University Olomouc in the Czech Republic.
“This makes people think, ‘This is just the kind of thing we did in the past’.”