The CCP police raided last week the Hong Kong exhibition commemorating the 1989 tragedy. But the museum lives online.
by Gladys Kwok
Last Thursday, citizens of Hong Kong watched in surprise while the police blocked Mong Kok Road around the Ngai Wong Commercial Building. Later, armed police were seen carrying away boxes of material, and it became clear that they had raided the June 4th Museum, which collected memories of the Tiananmen Square carnage of June 4, 1989.
The museum had already been closed by the police on June 2, under the pretext of alleged breaches of health regulations and administrative rules. Now, it has been definitively uprooted.
The June 4th Museum hosted a unique collection of artifacts, photographs, and documents about the students’ fight for democracy and its merciless repression in 1989. Among the most symbolic items were some of the banned statues of the Goddess of Democracy that the students had placed in Tiananmen Square and the police had destroyed, and a bottle of liquor produced clandestinely by pro-democracy activists in Sichuan in 2016 to commemorate the victims of Tiananmen. Those who were involved in the liquor production were all arrested, but one bottle found its way to Hong Kong.
The museum was connected with the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, whose five leaders were also arrested last week, and accused of espionage on behalf of Taiwan and Western countries, a crime that may lead to life imprisonment and even to the death penalty.
“Nothing scares the CCP more than the memory of Tiananmen, a citizen who lives nearby told Bitter Winter. What is remembered may happen again. This is why keeping alive the memory of June 4 is such a big crime for the CCP.”
In anticipation of the liquidation of the physical museum in Hong Kong, last month a virtual version was launched, based in the European Union and outside the reach of Chinese authorities, with photographs of all the items once exhibited in Mong Kok Road.
The online museum lives and thrives, and promises to remain a thorn on the side of the CCP. Its organizers are determined to remind the world every day that what happened in Tiananmen reveals the true, malignant nature of the CCP.