Apart from having to accept that some of her running peers were now behind bars amid a new political landscape, Wei also found it hard to believe the Pillar of Shame was gone.

Last December, HKU removed the eight-metre sculpture in light of “external legal advice and risk assessment”. Depicting a mass of writhing, tortured bodies, the artwork, a gift to Hong Kong from Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt, was regarded as a June 4 icon.

A day after HKU’s move, Chinese University and Lingnan University followed suit, removing a statue known as the Goddess of Democracy and tearing down a wall relief respectively, both symbols marking the crackdown.

“Things have taken a drastic turn at a fast pace,” Wei, a former district councillor, said. “I still remember we decided to start in Tsim Sha Tsui because we wanted to promote the cause to mainland tourists there. But now maybe even Hongkongers will refrain from sharing any posts related to the crackdown on social media.”

Hong Kong police warn against ‘unlawful assemblies’ on June 4

That insecurity was also carried by Wei, who did not take any group pictures following the run.

“I know in my heart what we did is not illegal, but you just never know where the so-called red line is being drawn,” she said.

In 1989, China was gripped by a pro-democracy movement, leading to street protests, weeks of sit-ins and hunger strikes at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Students and residents demanded reforms, culminating in a military crackdown on June 4. It is still unclear how many died.

In the hands of a diaspora

Since 1990, Hong Kong had been the only city on Chinese soil where large-scale activities were held to mourn those killed in the crackdown. The annual June 4 vigil at Victoria Park served both as a visual spectacle with its sea of lighted candles, and a spiritual anchor for the occasion.

But for three consecutive years, Hong Kong authorities have banned holding “other events”, including a vigil, in the Causeway Bay park, citing public health concerns over the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sporadic commemorations took place across the city’s streets last year as residents lit candles and flashed their phone lights in a show of defiance, after police shut down Victoria Park to prevent a repeat of 2020 when thousands forced their way in to light candles despite the ban.

Hong Kong June 4 activities will be subject to laws: Carrie Lam

Yet the mood has changed this year after national security police arrested key members of the 32-year-old alliance last summer.

Catholic churches that used to hold an annual mass for the occasion – seen by some as the safest way for residents to memorialise the event since the police ban – have decided for the first time to skip the ritual.

Some pro-establishment figures suggested low-key, private actions in small groups should be allowed, but legal experts argued more clarity was needed to determine the line between seditious and safe activities.

Sections of Victoria Park will be closed on June 4 for a second year, with police warning the public not to test the law with illegal assemblies in the area.

Even going alone could end in an arrest if an individual moved with others “with a common purpose to express certain views”, the force suggested.

Against such a backdrop, overseas commemorations of the event have taken on greater significance this year, especially when more Hongkongers have moved out of the city, or gone into exile, some in light of the national security law.

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Mass gatherings and seminars are being planned and led by Hongkongers in Britain, Prague, the United States and Taiwan.

Historian Hans Yeung Wing-yu, who moved to Britain after resigning from his post at the city’s exam authority two years ago over a university entrance test question deemed politically incorrect to the pro-Beijing bloc, will be a panellist at one such forum.

Pointing to a coming large-scale commemoration in Britain on June 4, where rallies are planned in a number of major cities, Yeung argued such events were no longer just an attempt by Hongkongers to mourn the Tiananmen victims, but also their desire to carry on the city’s culture and struggle since they deemed it was no longer possible to do so in their hometown.

“They want to seize every opportunity to revisit the matter in the public sphere and to demonstrate Hongkongers’ unity. They are not only mourning the crackdown, but also the freedom Hong Kong used to enjoy,” he said.

Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, also agreed there would be new elements in the narrative for June 4 event supporters, under which they would seek remembrance for Hong Kong’s freedom to hold such commemorations.

“The passing of the baton to the Hong Kong diaspora will make the remembrance less visually impactful but more important,” he said, noting most residents stopped commemorating June 4 because of national security law risks, not because they no longer cared.

Overseas commemorations of the crackdown, led by mainland dissidents and existing Chinese communities, had been held for years.

But exiled writer and filmmaker Su Xiaokang, 73, who settled in the US after being listed by China as one of seven most-wanted intellectuals in 1989, admitted that mass vigils in Washington had grown more subdued with each passing year, mostly due to leadership problems and also the fact that Chinese students there were cautious about their participation.

Having the Hong Kong diaspora take up the torch might help reignite the collective memory of those abroad, Su said.

But Lau Siu-kai, vice-president of semi-official think tank the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, poured cold water on hopes of such remembrance events.

“The Chinese communities in other places, such as Singapore and Taiwan, have long lost interest in the June 4 crackdown. It’s only some Hongkongers who refuse to let go,” Lau said, adding such events might fail to draw crowds and would exert little influence on local societies and communities back home.

“Not many Hong Kong media outlets will like to report these sensitive matters under the current political climate,” he pointed out.

While some in Hong Kong might still be marking the crackdown in their own smaller ways, Lau said he expected the memories to eventually fade in the absence of the annual, emotionally charged candlelight vigil.

Ip Kwok-him, a local delegate to the national legislature and also an adviser to the city’s leader in the Executive Council, said the demise of the vigil was “not a pity”.

“It is time for Hongkongers to look into the truth to see what actually happened on June 4. Is it really a massacre?” he said.

What’s in a memory?

Apart from the candlelight vigil, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China used to hire full-time staff in promoting its cause throughout the year, such as running a now-closed museum featuring the history and rare artefacts of the crackdown, organising postcard campaigns to help mainland dissidents and support groups for victims’ families, and recruiting young volunteers to pass the torch.

One of the former recruits was Ashley Chau, who served as a volunteer at 17. Born on the mainland before her family moved to the city when she was six, Chau only learned of the crackdown when she read about it in newspaper clippings, which galvanised her to contribute to the cause.

She distributed fliers on the streets for the alliance and served as a guide at its June 4 museum. “Why do people refuse to let go? It’s because they refuse to resign themselves to it. There are bound to be people who keep asking [about the crackdown] for the rest of their lives, as long as their demands and questions are left unaddressed,” said Chau, now a 32-year-old business consultant.

“Such determination might in fact be weakened if an apology [from China] is offered.”

Hong Kong church holds June 4 commemorative event amid security law concerns

History and cultural studies professor Alison Landsberg, who specialises in memory studies at George Mason University in the US, argued in her work that the construction of “prosthetic memories” – produced by an individual’s encounter with a past event in either film, television, an experiential museum, or in Hong Kong’s context, a vigil – could be a useful mechanism for those who were not yet born during a historical event, to empathise with emotions from the incident.

“In this way, the individual is brought close to the event, and learns about the event in a way that is effectively charged with emotion,” Landsberg told the Post.

“If it is in fact impossible to talk about the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Hong Kong, the role of those who have left becomes even more important. Perhaps there is a burden on them to create cultural or mass cultural representations of the events that bring those in Hong Kong who are too young to remember the event into contact with it via a mediated representation.”

That aspiration was probably what kept Germany-based Chinese writer Chang Ping going. He was tasked by the alliance to run a virtual museum on the crackdown last year after risk assessments.

“The museum is one of the final struggles of the alliance in preserving June 4 memories before it disbanded,” he said. “History can be silent, but it will never disappear.”

Can Hongkongers still hold June 4 commemorative events?

The museum was now run by a team of young members based worldwide, Chang said. The process itself, he said, was already a way to pass on the memories.

But Wei, a veteran volunteer of the alliance who once served as the stage manager of the annual vigil, was less upbeat.

There was a powerful symbolism to the mass gathering in Victoria Park – to be seen by the world, and to offer comfort to “Tiananmen mothers” that they were not alone, she said.

Wei said she believed the June 4 memories would fade one day, or were more likely to be remembered in another version, given her pessimism over the political situation in Hong Kong.

For Wei, June 4 will never be just another day on her calendar. She plans to at least put work aside and spend the night with her close friends as usual, even though their meeting point will no longer be Victoria Park.