HONG KONG — Hong Kong made mocking China’s national anthem a crime on Thursday, passing a contentious law on the anniversary of the Chinese military’s bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.
The move adds to fears that the space in Hong Kong for speech critical of Beijing will continue to shrink, as China’s ruling Communist Party tightens its control over the semiautonomous city after a year of antigovernment protests.
For the first time ever, the local authorities have banned the annual vigil in Hong Kong to remember the victims of the Tiananmen killings in 1989, though activists said they would gather regardless. Hong Kong, which has far greater civil liberties than mainland China, has always been the most important site for public commemoration of the June 4 massacre, and the only large-scale one on Chinese soil.
The Chinese government declared last week that it would impose new national security laws on Hong Kong. The laws, which would take aim at antigovernment protests and other forms of dissent, call into question the future of organizations and events that challenge the party’s rule.
Hong Kong’s legislature, which is dominated by pro-Beijing lawmakers, passed a separate piece of legislation on Thursday that would criminalize disrespect for China’s national anthem and make it punishable by up to three years in prison. On Thursday, several opposition lawmakers disrupted the debate by throwing stink bombs inside the legislative chamber and yelling: “A murderous regime stinks for 10,000 years.”
“What we did today is to remind the world that we should never forgive the Chinese Communist Party for killing its own people 31 years ago,” Eddie Chu, one of the opposition lawmakers, told reporters later.
The Tiananmen vigil, often a sea of candlelit faces against the backdrop of the city’s dense buildings, has offered the rare opportunity in Chinese territory to remember the hundreds and possibly thousands of people who were killed by troops in Beijing and other cities in the summer of 1989.
In mainland China, any discussion of the anniversary is quickly scrubbed by censors, while the authorities harass relatives of those killed and block any formal memorials.
Mr. Chu, the pro-democracy lawmaker, said he intended to walk toward the site of the vigil on Thursday despite the police ban. “The world has to see the lighthouse of memory standing tall at Victoria Park this year, more than any other year,” he wrote on Facebook.
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Where we left off
In the summer of 2019, Hong Kong protesters began fighting a rule that would allow extraditions to China. These protests eventually broadened to protect Hong Kong’s autonomy from China. The protests wound down when pro-democracy candidates notched a stunning victory in Hong Kong elections in November, in what was seen as a pointed rebuke of Beijing and its allies in Hong Kong.
Late in 2019, the protests then quieted.
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How it’s different this time
Those peaceful mass rallies that occurred in June of 2019 were pointed against the territory leadership of Hong Kong. Later, they devolved into often-violent clashes between some protesters and police officers and lasted through November 2019. The current protests are aimed at mainland China.
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What’s happening now
This latest round of demonstrations in Hong Kong has been fueled largely by China’s ruling Communist Party move this month to impose new national security legislation for Hong Kong.
To China, the rules are necessary to protect the country’s national sovereignty. To critics, they further erode the relative autonomy granted to the territory after Britain handed it back to China in 1997.
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What this legislation would do
The rules would take direct aim at the anti-government protests and other dissent in Hong Kong. They are expected to prevent and punish secession, subversion as well as foreign infiltration — all of which Beijing has blamed for fueling unrest in the city.
The legislation would also allow the mainland’s feared security agencies to set up their operations publicly in Hong Kong for the first time, instead of operating on a limited scale in secrecy.
In trying to pass this legislation, Beijing is bypassing the Hong Kong government, and the legislation is being pushed by China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress.
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Understand the Current Hong Kong Protests
Updated May 27, 2020
Earlier this week, the police banned the vigil, which is usually held in Victoria Park on Hong Kong island, on the grounds that it would risk spreading the coronavirus. Public gatherings of more than eight people have been barred in the city, a ban that was extended this week.
Organizers of the vigil said they believed political motives were behind the decision to block it. The police have cited social-distancing regulations to limit pro-democracy protests in recent months.
The organizers have asked those who want to mark the anniversary to light candles on their own, or at booths set up around the city, and post the images online.
In addition, seven Catholic churches in Hong Kong planned Masses on Thursday that would include a moment of silent prayer and lighting of candles for those killed in 1989. Hong Kong’s social-distancing limits for churches are looser; during services, they can be filled to half of their maximum capacity.
But members of the group that hosts the annual vigil, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, said they believed it was also important to gather in Victoria Park, despite the risk of fines or arrest.
“It will be the last candlelight vigil before the national security act,” Lee Cheuk-yan, the chairman of the alliance, said in explaining why he planned to still go to the park. “Next year will be even more dangerous. Next year they can use the national security act against the people of Hong Kong.”
The ban on the vigil added to the drumbeat of concerns that Beijing’s demands for security and stability would further erode Hong Kong’s civil liberties. In recent months, the police have taken an increasingly tough approach to the protest movement that began last year over a plan, since dropped, to allow extraditions to mainland China. Now, officers move quickly to pre-empt protests by making arrests and imposing security perimeters.
Beijing is drafting the new national security laws, which it says will target subversion, secession and terrorism in Hong Kong. But there are widespread fears that they will be used to suppress mere dissent and criticism of the Communist Party.
The national anthem law raises similar concerns.
Hong Kong officially adopted the Chinese national anthem, March of the Volunteers, in 1997, after the British colony was returned to Chinese control. But some of the city’s residents never accepted it as their own, often booing loudly when the song was played at sporting events.
The new law would target such behavior, calling for a fine of up to about $6,500 and three years in prison for anyone found to be misusing or insulting the anthem.
It was a defeat for the city’s pro-democracy lawmakers, who had sought to delay the bill’s passage in recent weeks. Brawls erupted between lawmakers and some were ejected from the chambers.
That the law was passed on the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown only underscored the concerns that have fueled the antigovernment protests over the past year.
Each June 4, the hard-surfaced soccer fields of Victoria Park have served not only as a place to memorialize the dead, but as a history classroom for the young and a canvasing site for local pro-democracy groups. It has also acted as a gauge of whether Hong Kong can maintain the political freedoms that have become part of its identity, guaranteed under a policy known as “one country, two systems,” which was put in place when the city was returned to China.
“It’s a sort of symbol of whether, under Communist Party rule, ‘one country, two systems’ can work, of whether we can have this condemnation of the massacre continuously carried forward after ’97,” Mr. Lee said.
At the vigils, local religious leaders and pro-democracy political figures usually speak, along with veterans of the Tiananmen protests and parents of demonstrators who were killed.
Han Dongfang, a Tiananmen protest leader who spent almost two years in prison after the crackdown, has regularly attended the vigils since he was expelled from mainland China in 1993. He said he, too, would go to Victoria Park with his children, despite the police restrictions.
“I don’t mind if other people don’t go, if it is not an official event or demonstration or protest,” said Mr. Han, who runs a workers’ rights organization, the China Labor Bulletin. “To me it’s a symbolic place and a symbolic day to commemorate this for my children. I want them to know.”
As President Trump has pushed for the use of armed forces in the United States to quell the unrest that has followed the killing of a black man by the police in Minnesota, Mr. Han said governments should resist that option.
“The military should never be used to answer protests, not under a dictatorship or in a democracy,” he said.
Attendance at past vigils has risen and fallen from year to year, often in line with broader public sentiment toward China’s central government. Younger activists, who have increasingly rejected ties to mainland China and asserted a separate and distinct identity, have organized alternative commemorations, saying the vigil’s calls for a democratic China were disconnected from Hong Kong’s own political struggles.
Skyler Wong, a 24-year-old environmental educator, said she first attended the vigil by herself at age 15, after a teacher showed video clips of the crackdown in class. The vigil was the first political event she had attended, and she says it prompted her political awakening.
“I was very moved,” she said. “I grew up thinking Hong Kongers were very apathetic. I never thought that there would be so many in Hong Kong who would take a stand over their conscience.”
Ms. Wong said she planned to attend a smaller open-air discussion and light candles in her community to commemorate the event.
In the semiautonomous region of Macau, the only other place in China where Tiananmen is publicly commemorated, the authorities last month revoked permission for an annual exhibition of photos from the crackdown. Democracy activists there said they suspected that the move, which was described as part of a standardization of the use of public spaces, was an effort to clamp down on dissent.
Like Hong Kong, Macau operates as a part of China but with its own local system. In practice, it is far more politically constrained than Hong Kong.
Austin Ramzy and Tiffany May reported from Hong Kong and Javier C. Hernández from Taipei, Taiwan. Elaine Yu contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
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