Hong Kong’s Democracy Wall
I’d noticed it before, but the significance of the Democracy Wall, a bulletin board outside the University of Hong Kong’s main library, didn’t strike me until earlier this spring. When I first saw it, I thought its name was a wry reference to the brick wall that became a popular venue for dissent during 1978’s Beijing Spring, a brief period of political liberalization that occurred after the end of the Cultural Revolution in late 1976. But halfway through the school year’s second semester, I began to notice the ever-growing cluster of students who stared intently at the photos, essays and posters tacked neatly on the board. I took a closer look and realized that the Democracy Wall was more than just a reference to a short-lived burst of free expression in post-Mao China: it was a response to the June 4, 1989 crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, which traumatized Hong Kong and left a lasting impression on the city’s consciousness.
Each spring, as the anniversary of the crackdown approaches, the Democracy Wall plays host to a lively debate between HKU students over whether the Chinese government’s response to the student protests was appropriate. It’s a debate that echoes a much larger political division in Hong Kong. The conservative establishment, led by the business elite, tends to emphasize China’s economic progress since 1989, implying that even if what happened at Tiananmen was terrible, there’s no need to dwell on the past. The liberal, pro-democracy opposition insists that the Chinese government needs to acknowledge what happened, admit that it was wrong and reverse its policy of suppressing information about the events. The debate at HKU was complicated by the fact that many students come from the mainland, where they were never taught about the massacre. Some are shocked to learn about what happened, but others, like their conservative Hong Kong counterparts, insist that it was justified.
Interest in Tiananmen has waned in recent years, but its impending twentieth anniversary has reignited passions, and June 4th is once again a major issue in Hong Kong. A yearly poll conducted by the University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme found that 61 percent of Hong Kongers feel that the central government must reverse its position on the Tiananmen Square incident, compared to 49 percent last year. 69 percent feel that China “did the wrong thing” in suppressing the demonstrations. Considering all of this, then, it seems that Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, did not have much of a feel for the public mood when he claimed in a meeting of the Legislative Council that most Hong Kong people want to forget about June 4th and move on. He probably wasn’t prepared for the wave of anger that then washed over him — consider My Little Airport’s hastily-made music video response, “Donald Tsang, Please Die.”
Tensions ran high at HKU, too. In early April, somebody vandalized the Democracy Wall. Then, at a public debate held in front of the wall, the president of the undergraduate students’ union, Ayo Chan, said that he thought the 1989 student protesters were misguided. His remarks led students to organize a recall referendum. They won; Chan was forced to resign. In early May, however, when classes ended and students began to prepare for their exams, the Democracy Wall was suddenly cleared. The debate over Tiananmen came to an abrupt end just as it was intensifying outside the school gates — I guess the Hong Kong obsession with exams trumps even the deepest political dispute.
Tags: Democracy Wall, Hong Kong, Posters, University of Hong Kong
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