Hong Kong students split from vigil for Tiananmen victims

Associated Press

HONG KONG

While Hong Kong residents crammed into a park Saturday to remember the victims of China’s bloody crackdown on protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 27 years ago, many student groups had rival events in a sign of the widening rift in the city’s pro-democracy movement.

The annual evening vigil at Victoria Park is the only large-scale public commemoration on Chinese soil of Beijing’s brutal crackdown. About the only sign in Beijing that it was the anniversary of the event was the tightened security around Tiananmen Square.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed as tanks and troops converged on Beijing on the night of June 3-4, 1989. The topic remains taboo in China, and any form of commemoration, whether public or private, is banned.

Organizers in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous city that enjoys many civil liberties not seen in mainland China, said 125,000 people attended Saturday’s vigil, but the crowd appeared to be smaller. Police gave an estimate of 21,800.

Missing from the crowd were the student groups that had been long-standing supporters of the annual vigil. Instead, a dozen student organizations had discussion forums on Hong Kong’s future. The move underscores the split that emerged between younger and older generations of pro-democracy activists over Hong Kong identity after 2014 protests against the Chinese government’s decision to restrict elections in the city.

Student leaders decided to abstain from the vigil after they quit the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China – the vigil’s organizer – in April because they felt one of the alliance’s main aims, fighting for democracy in mainland China, was no longer realistic.