Every year in China the Christmas season is used to create political facts that should get as little attention as possible from the western public.
This year, that should have been the calculation of the authorities in Hong Kong.
After the sculpture "Pillar of Shame" was removed from the University of Hong Kong campus last Thursday, two more works of art followed on Christmas Eve, which were also dedicated to the victims of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.
Friederike Böge
Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.
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The Hong Kong Monument Tower removed the last remnants of an institutional Hong Kong culture of remembrance of the 1989 democracy movement.
In all three cases, this was done overnight and with the help of screens to prevent symbolic photos.
Until now, Hong Kong was the only place in China where such monuments were still tolerated.
In the rest of the country, any public gesture commemorating the bloody June 4th, 1989, is censored and punished.
The number of victims is unknown.
Estimates range from a few hundred to a few thousand.
"The goddess of democracy" is removed
The Chinese University of Hong Kong removed the sculpture "Goddess of Democracy" by Los Angeles-based artist Chen Weiming on Christmas Eve. It had stood on campus for eleven years and was modeled on the statue of the same name that the Beijing student movement erected on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The university said it had never approved the statue's erection. "No organization has taken responsibility for its maintenance and management." Two organizations that were originally involved in the establishment no longer exist. This relates, on the one hand, to the Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China, which has organized an annual vigil in Hong Kong to commemorate the Tiananmen victims for almost thirty years, most recently in 2019. The organization was disbanded in September after all the leading ones Members had been arrested and partially convicted. The group also ran a memorial museum that was closed by police. The second organization mentioned, the Student Union, was disbanded in October.Both were part of the once vibrant civil society in Hong Kong, which China's central government has largely smashed through a “national security law”. More than 50 civil society organizations have since announced their dissolution.
Lingnan University also had a Tiananmen relief removed on Christmas Eve.
Among other things, it showed the so-called Tank-Man, a student who was photographed confronting a column of tanks.
To this day it is unclear what happened to him later.
The relief also comes from Chen Weiming and was erected in 2009.
"Legal or security risks"?
The university justified the step by stating that the work of art could represent “legal or security risks” for the university community. In similar words, the University of Hong Kong had the eight-meter-high "Pillar of Shame" by Danish artist Jens Galschiøt dismantled on Thursday. The college referred to a law from the British colonial era that a continued exhibition of the copper sculpture could allegedly violate. Galschiøt said he had tried unsuccessfully since October to contact the university to remove his work of art himself. He said he had received offers from several countries to erect the pillar of shame there. Now he has announced that he will sue the university for damages.At the same time he supports the creation of small replicas with the help of 3-D printers. Many Hong Kong residents oppose the ban on remembrance in their own way. Last June, thousands of candles put in their windows.
Relatives of prominent imprisoned civil rights activists fear that the Chinese authorities could use the time until the turn of the year for politically sensitive court cases.
Like every year.