Memory under assault: Rewriting history and banning commemoration in Hong Kong 

30 November 2021

Historical revisionism in official Chinese narratives is nothing new. For decades the Communist Party has waged a war on “historical nihilism” — their term for historians daring to question the party line on anything from Chairman Mao to the Qing Empire. And yet, the last two years have seen a new stage of this war open, as CCP-style historical revisionism has come to Hong Kong in full force. With the promulgation of a new national security law in Hong Kong, the assault on historical memory — both of the recent and more distant past — has gained momentum.

This year both Hong Kong and Macau governments banned the cities’ annual 4 June vigils to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre. Hong Kong authorities cited concerns over COVID-19, as they did in June 2020. The Macau police force was blunter, citing the risk that the vigil would break criminal laws, including “instigating subversion and defamation” in their official reasoning for the ban. Neither the slogans and placards displayed at the vigil nor the criminal law of Macau have changed much in the past twenty years, so clearly, something else has happened to make the police now ban the vigil on those grounds. It is as if Hong Kong’s national security law has reached beyond the border, to stifle speech and embolden law enforcement across China’s special administrative regions.

Policing history

The banning of 4 June vigils in Hong Kong and Macau is significant outside these formerly free-wheeling cities as well. They were the last places for publicly commemorating the 1989 events anywhere in China, and these annual events became focal points for wider calls to democratise China and, importantly, symbols of a stubborn refusal to forget the past. The harder authorities in the mainland fought to censor mentions of the massacre, the more people attended the vigils — particularly the one in Hong Kong, which has routinely attracted over a hundred thousand participants in recent years. Even last year, the first time the vigil was formally banned, it managed to attract enough participants to fill Victoria Park.

Too many young people have been politicised by the events of the past two years, and many of them now bear physical and mental scars, forming an embodied communal archive that will be hard to control. Commemoration, like dissent, is going underground.

Hong Kong has until recently been relatively free from the strict policing of memory taking place in the rest of China. This was one reason why so many artefacts and historical objects related to the Tiananmen Square crackdown were brought from the mainland to Hong Kong to be displayed in the June 4th Museum. Yet many of those very artefacts have now been seized by the Hong Kong Police Force’s new national security unit as part of their investigation into the group behind the museum. The type of media censorship that has long been the norm in the mainland has also come to Hong Kong, affecting everything from locally made movies and documentaries to international shows like The Simpsons.

In recent weeks another symbol of solidarity and memory has come under threat: The Pillar of Shame. The monument, which has sat on the Hong Kong University campus since 1997, is an 8-metre-tall concrete statue of twisted bodies forming a pillar. When it arrived in Hong Kong, the placement of the statue became a contested issue and HKU students had to fight with both the university leadership and city authorities to get the statue placed on the Pokfulam campus. It then travelled to other Hong Kong universities, making a stop at the annual vigil in 1998, before returning more permanently to HKU. That is until university leadership via the global law firm Mayer Brown announced this October that the pillar’s days at HKU were numbered. The physical removal has yet to take place, in part because of the involvement of the monument’s Danish sculptor who has asked he be allowed to bring the piece to Denmark to avoid the university or Hong Kong authorities destroying it. Mayer Brown for their part have ceased work for HKU after the significant international blowback they faced for their involvement in the removal of the memorial.

The looming removal of the Pillar of Shame is indicative of a broader assault on historical memory within Hong Kong. As part of the dismantling of the city’s democratic institutions, patriotic education is now a top priority for local authorities. Patriotic in this context means Party-approved, and it includes the erasure of a range of topics and perspectives, including the long history of political dissent within Hong Kong as well as many nuances of the British colonial period. Along with the censoring of education comes a range of related encroachments on historical memory in the city, including revising museum exhibits and removing critical books from public libraries.

Reshaping Hong Kong

The censoring of history and commemoration serves at least three related purposes. First, it allows the governments in Hong Kong and Beijing to shape the narrative and the official interpretation of the recent protests and the political crisis surrounding them. The authorities have made a variety of ham-fisted attempts at providing such interpretations since the very start of the protests. But with the full extent of the National Security Law now at their disposal, such attempts are likely to gain more ground, especially as news archives and other public records can be removed or censored.

Second, it plays an important part in the project of providing ‘patriotic’ education to all Hongkongers, something which has been a concern for Beijing since before the handover. Previous attempts at reshaping the educational curriculum toward patriotism and away from critical thinking were met with widespread resistance and led to, among other things, the politicisation of a generation of Hongkongers in 2012. But those attempts now have a much stronger political and legal foundation and widespread public dissent has been made near-impossible. Third, it goes towards the broader goal of bringing the practices and institutions of Hong Kong in line with those of the mainland. The notion of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ has already been hollowed out politically and legally, and by further policing history within Hong Kong, the hope is to culturally integrate the city with the mainland.

Going forward

Commemorating 4 June is a particularly salient problem. Not only is it an explicit show of solidarity between Hongkongers and pro-democracy forces in the mainland, but it also allows those involved in Hong Kong’s 2019-2020 protests to see their struggle as part of a long history of contentious politics and state repression across China.

The removal of the Pillar of Shame forces us to ask another important question: Can Hong Kong universities be trusted as custodians of history? In the wake of the 2019-2020 protests, several projects were launched to preserve an archive of materials documenting the social movement and the political crisis in the city. But if such archives, whether physical or digital, were to be hosted by an institution of higher education within Hong Kong, what is the guarantee that it would not disappear overnight or, even more insidiously, suffer from curatorial censorship? There are still plenty of researchers within Hong Kong academia engaging in robust and critical historical work, but university leaders have shown little appetite for pushing back against demands from the authorities to limit academic freedom. The obvious solution, then, would be for an academic institution outside Hong Kong to work with researchers within the city to establish such a collection.

Not content with effectively banning political dissent and arresting most of the opposition, authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing are now going after the city's collective memory. What is at stake are the future generations of Hongkongers and the fact that, somewhere in China, people openly refuse to forget. The struggle for continued public displays of commemoration is likely already over. Yet, if this year’s activities are anything to go by, banning and censoring history are unlikely to succeed in altering collective memory. Too many young people have been politicised by the events of the past two years, and many of them now bear physical and mental scars, forming an embodied communal archive that will be hard to control. Commemoration, like dissent, is going underground.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Jeppe Mulich is a Lecturer in Modern History at the Department of International Politics at City, University of London. He works on law, empire, and contentious politics. Image credit: Flickr/Studio Incendo.