A Profile of Hong Kong by Bruce Herschensohn

Author:Bruce Herschensohn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SHADOW OF THE TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE IN BEIJING LINGERS LARGE AND LONG IN HONG KONG

In Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, police reported some one million people holding candles, with more than one-sixth of the entire population of the entire Hong Kong territory standing there in silence. At the center of the massive crowd was a giant replica of the Goddess of Democracy, taller than the original that had stood in Tiananmen Square.

Szeto Wah started at the base of the statue and spoke to the crowd through what seemed to be hundreds of loudspeakers. (He spoke in Cantonese.) Some of the organizers were passing out pieces of paper. “We have English,” one of the organizers said, and he handed a piece of paper to those who nodded at him.

The paper that was passed out to the candleholders told that troops had mopped up Tiananmen Square by burning and removing bodies, and in the absence of more targets in the Square, the killing had expanded.

The bottom of the paper had a statement of US President Bush: “I deeply deplore the decision to use force against peaceful demonstrators and the consequent loss of life. We have been urging and continue to urge non-violence, restraint, and dialogue. Tragically, another course has been chosen. Again, I urge a return to non-violent means for dealing with the current situation.”

Any remaining optimism among the Hong Kong people and their international supporters was smothered by the revelations told by those who became Tiananmen Square victims and lived, then disguised themselves and escaped capture in Beijing, by daring to take trains southward into Hong Kong while claiming all kinds of made-up stories told to Beijing uniformed observers as to why they were traveling from Beijing to Hong Kong.

After some safely got away with their impersonations of travelers supposedly making it into Hong Kong to buy watches and other gifts for friends, they headed for Hong Kong coffee shops and talked to patrons who would listen—including officials of the Hong Kong press to whom they told some of their first-hand experiences of being beside victims in the now world-known Massacre that the People’s Republic would refer to simply as the non-defined phrase, “the June 4th Incident.”

Americans who coincidentally were in those Hong Kong coffee shops listened to the accounts of those patrons who had been in Tiananmen Square.

In contrast, the Chinese demonstrators in Tiananmen Square had been immersed in something far different than known in the United States. It was clear that Tiananmen Square was not the American-known Potomac Park with the smell of marijuana and crowded sleeping bags as strangers searched for physical pleasures, nor was it an arena for cowardice to be justified by slogans of false innocence. This was something different. The only similarities to those crowds in Washington D.C. were the smells of unchanged clothes and the noises and disorder, but all that had paled in minutes, and those particular young people who had been demonstrators in Tiananmen were welcome as they were: good because there was something that permeated these young people while reeking of an ageless and timeless importance.

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