After showdown over Tiananmen vigil banned in Hong Kong, both police and residents claim victory – but what happens next?
- After authorities banned Victoria Park gathering, residents marking the event blended into the streets and showed their defiance in other ways
- Police avoided confrontation and arrested a handful of people, adopting a strategy that could be used in managing such events in the future
Several thousand officers patrolled the grounds and surrounding areas, erected metal barricades and orange tape, and stood on guard in the hot sun. When workers left their offices in the evening, stop-and-search operations at several crowded locations were mounted, targeting those wearing black and carrying backpacks.
As the hour of reckoning approached, a water cannon and two armoured vehicles were spotted making their way from Fanling to Hong Kong Island.
At 8pm, cocking a snook at the massive show of force, Hongkongers across the city promptly lit candles and flashed the lights on their mobile phones.
But if it was also intended to put a stop to Hong Kong’s long run as the only city in the nation with public commemorations of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the police intervention failed. Defiant residents remained determined to memorialise the Chinese killed by security forces in June 1989, when the central government lost patience with the student-led pro-democracy protests in Beijing and other cities.
Police close down part of Victoria Park to stop gatherings for banned June 4 event
Undeterred, hundreds of Hongkongers blocked from entering Victoria Park circled the vicinity and fanned out to the nearby shopping district. They kept moving, blending in with shoppers and diners, testing the limits of public assembly regulations. In Mong Kok as well as Causeway Bay, they held lit mobile phones aloft, and at several points, some shouted pro-independence slogans. There were moments of tension as officers snuffed out candles in Mong Kok and crowds tried to surge past police lines.
In seven churches across the city, several thousand people attended mass and prayed for the victims of Tiananmen. Outside their premises, people milled around also with their phone lights on. Cars honked their horns as they drove past.
The police did not want to deal with it by making mass arrests
The deployment of 7,000 police personnel netted six other people arrested for illegal assembly. Twelve others were fined for flouting social-distancing rules.
According to sources familiar with the police operation, both the government and the force were “quite relieved and satisfied” with the deployment and tactics of the evening.
“There was no massive confrontation, no serious clashes, the situation was well under control,” said one insider, adding that any escalation of tensions would only have worsened the political climate.
While the police succeeded in blocking the mass event, the protesters can claim a moral victory. They managed to commemorate Tiananmen openly and photogenically, and were rewarded with global news coverage. They did so mostly with impunity, despite the worrying signs over the past year that police would show zero tolerance towards dissent.
What is unclear is whether this is a new normal that both sides are prepared to accept. Legal experts, political pundits, and police officers current and former who spoke to the Post cited a range of reasons explaining why there were not more arrests.
A 22-year veteran of the force, Lai said the police actions were intended to act as a deterrent, although Chow’s arrest might have backfired by generating sympathy for the cause and motivating more people to turn up that night. He said that the force’s pre-emptive move to seal off Victoria Park was a good strategy to enforce the pandemic regulations.
But it did not stop commemorative masses taking place at the churches. Apart from Causeway Bay, people also gathered at Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui and Tsuen Wan. Either police felt the situation in those locations did not reach a level requiring arrests or they faced difficulties in carrying them out, Lai said.
When people outside Fashion Walk in Causeway Bay began chanting “Liberate Hong Kong; revolution of our times”, police raised a purple flag warning of a possible breach of the national security law. The protesters quickly dispersed and officers did not give chase, unlike scenes witnessed during the social unrest two years ago.
Lai said that when police raised flags, they meant to issue a warning and buy time to observe whom they needed to pursue. “But bear in mind there is a goal to the warning, and if the objective is achieved, police officers will have to stop,” he explained.
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Barrister Anson Wong Yu-yat said that while there was no legal requirement to give such warnings, courts might question the proportionality of making arrests if officers did not show sufficient restraint.
A police source said there had not been any change of tactics in dealing with people shouting pro-independence slogans. “Over the past 12 months, we are advised to give a warning before a possible arrest. Everything depends on the circumstances on the ground,” he said.
Officers would often film what happened at the scene and if no arrests were made, they reserved the right to do so following further investigation, he added.
One of the main tactics used by protesters, turning on the lights of their mobile phones to simulate candles, would not violate any law if performed individually. Many conditions would have to be satisfied before a court might be persuaded that such actions were done with a common purpose in an unauthorised assembly, said Wong, the barrister. Compared with yelling slogans, lighting up their phones in silent protest was more subtle, Lai noted. Arresting Hongkongers for doing so would have been hard to justify.
Lau Siu-kai, vice-president of Beijing’s semi-official Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, said that the government’s political objectives had been met. Police had effectively reduced the scale of the commemoration, and it was not the authorities’ intention to get rid of it once and for all, he said.
“So long as you are not trying to incite a riot or challenge the national security or any other law in Hong Kong, they would not care,” Lau said.
The way authorities acted suggested there would still be room for commemorations in the future, as long as people did not shout or harp on the alliance’s goal of an “end to one-party dictatorship”, he said.
Members of the pro-establishment camp, such as Lau, have said the mantra is problematic because it goes against the national constitution, which states that China is a “socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship”.
Simon Young Ngai-man, a legal scholar from the University of Hong Kong, believed that the slogan was also troublesome under the city’s broadly defined colonial-era sedition law, which criminalises words that bring into hatred or contempt, or excite disaffection, against the central government.
Another law scholar, who preferred to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the topic, said mere mourning or vigils, without making political demands, were less likely to be considered a violation of the national security law.
What is the sedition law, and how does it fit into landscape of national security legislation?
But Richard Tsoi Yiu-cheong, the organising alliance’s secretary, said the police tactics this year – including closing their 30-year-old venue – were already undesirable enough, even though Hongkongers had adopted creative ways to press on with their commemoration.
“The goal was to spread that chilling effect so that people won’t come out,” he said.
While it was difficult to predict the prospect of future commemorations, Tsoi urged authorities to learn from what happened this year.
“The government and the police should learn that there is no way to suppress it no matter how hard they try,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just better for people to express their views.”
Additional reporting by Christy Leung
