R Krishna Das
A day after dismantling the Pillar of Shame, a sculpture dedicated to victims of the 1989 crackdown, two more monuments were removed from two university campuses in Hong Kong in the early hours of Christmas Eve.
The two monuments also symbolized the brutality at the Tiananmen crackdown.
A 6.4-metre-tall replica of the Goddess of Democracy bronze statue, holding aloft a flame at Hong Kong’s Chinese University, was removed from a public piazza just before dawn. The university said in a statement that the “unauthorized statue” had been taken away.
Besides, Hong Kong’s Lingnan University also took down a Tiananmen massacre wall relief sculpture that also included a depiction of the Goddess of Democracy. The bas-relief includes images of a line of tanks halting before a lone protester known as “tank man”; and victims shot by Chinese troops being carried away.
The moves come just one day after the University of Hong Kong dismantled the eight-metre-tall Pillar of Shame, in a late-night operation. The statue showed piled-up corpses to commemorate the hundreds – possibly thousands – of pro-democracy protesters killed by Chinese authorities in 1989.
It was one of the few remaining public memorials in Hong Kong commemorating the incident. Beijing has increasingly been cracking down on political dissent in Hong Kong and leaving no trace of Tiananmen memory, a highly sensitive topic that China loves to avoid discussing. The Chinese government says 200 civilians and several dozen security personnel died while other estimates have ranged from hundreds to as many as 10,000.
Unlike mainland China, where Chinese authorities ban any memorials or public commemoration of June 4, Hong Kong had previously remained the only place on Chinese soil where such commemorations were permissible.
The artist, Chen Weiming, who created both the statue and wall relief, said “Freedom of Hong Kong is dead.”
