1. Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum is a single room of 800 square feet, tucked away on the
fifth floor of a downtown office building. Dedicated to the 1989 Tiananmen Square
protests, the exhibition is set up like a maze. And it’s due to close later this year. It’s a
good metaphor for Hong Kong’s conflicted attitude toward mainland Chinese politics.
The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, an
activist group formed days before June 4, 1989, opened the museum in April 2014 with
nearly $840,000 in donations. But a lawsuit filed by the building owners’ corporation,
allegedly for political reasons, is driving out the museum.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the­freedom­to­remember­tiananmen­square­1464888839
OPINION COMMENTARY
The Freedom to Remember
Tiananmen Square
Some of Hong Kong’s young activists are starting to take this privilege for granted.
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On June 4, 2015, people attend a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park in Hong Kong marking the 1989 student­led Tiananmen
Square protests. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2016 1:34 p.m. ET
By ELLIS LIANG

2. The Hong Kong Alliance wants to raise funds to move the museum to a bigger space that
would better serve its mission: to fulfill Hong Kong’s “responsibility to preserve history,
to impart truths, to awaken our collective conscience, to vindicate the movement, and to
spark reflections on the future of democracy in China.”
But the city’s younger generation doesn’t share that sentiment. Many of them
participated in Occupy Central, a sit-in for universal suffrage that began in September
2014 in the city’s downtown district and lasted for 75 days. After the movement failed to
sway Beijing, many students embraced “localism.” It ranges from booing mainland
sports teams all the way to making demands for independence.
June 4 remembrances are one casualty of localism. The Hong Kong Federation of
Students announced in April that it will withdraw from the Hong Kong Alliance and
boycott the annual June 4 candlelight vigil, citing “reservations about establishing a
democratic China.”
HKFS was a founding member of the Hong Kong Alliance in 1989. But in a recent
interview with local media, HKFS committee member Liu Chun-sing said, “Hong Kong
is already in deep trouble. Why don’t we first establish a democratic Hong Kong?”
Various student unions followed suit. The student-union president at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong complained about the “rigid format of the Victoria Park vigil.”
“I don’t think the vindication of the 1989 movement should be linked to building
democracy in China,” Chow Shue-fung told local media. “To go further, vindication of
the 1989 movement and building democracy in China are not moral responsibilities of
Hong Kong people.”
So now the student unions are organizing alternative events on June 4. Chinese
University’s student union will hold a forum on “Hong Kong’s future through the
meaning of June 4.” The Hong Kong University student union, which also boycotted the
vigil last year, will host a similar forum. Last week, President Althea Suen argued that
commemorative activities impede the city’s democratic development.
Attendance at the annual vigil rose to around 165,000 in the years following the 20th
anniversary in 2009, but this Saturday numbers could fall dramatically. Turnout at the
annual commemorative march on Sunday dropped by half to 1,500 people, according to
the Hong Kong Alliance.
The change in student attitudes may be due to growing anger with the Chinese
Communist Party. During an interview at the June 4th Museum this week, Alliance Vice

3. Chairman Richard Tsoi told me that Hong Kong’s students are looking for a new
political ideology after what they perceive has been a failure of civil disobedience.
If peaceful protests cannot bend the will of the CCP, perhaps Hong Kong people can only
protect themselves by tightening their hold on local culture and systems of governance.
“Some bring in the concept that if we have some distance from China, that may be good
for Hong Kong,” Mr. Tsoi said. “But politically, constitutionally, that is even more
difficult to achieve.”
Students are also growing impatient and more critical with the old guard of democracy
activists. They criticize the Hong Kong Alliance for having little to show for 27 years of
struggle. They dismiss moderate democrats in the legislature for being too
accommodating of Beijing.
But one must not be too pessimistic in the long fight for democracy as it may take
decades, says Mr. Tsoi. He also believes the Hong Kong Alliance has had its share of
victories. In 2003, the group organized a march that drew 500,000 people against a
proposed national-security law that threatened fundamental freedoms. The
government backed down shortly after.
Boycotting the vigil may actually hurt the students’ own cause. While young voices may
be beneficial in pushing the pro-democracy movement to be more aggressive, sowing
disunity does not bring the city any closer to universal suffrage. Nor does it make Beijing
more likely to offer cooperation, without which Hong Kong cannot achieve political
reform, short of declaring independence.
In a free society like Hong Kong, preserving truth—whether through a tiny museum or
the lighting of a candle—may seem like a mundane act. Not so in mainland China, where
three people were arrested this week for holding a secret commemoration in their
home. With booksellers being kidnapped, newspaper editors fired or stabbed, and
museums sued out of existence, it’s increasingly clear that truth-telling is an act of
resistance in Hong Kong too.
Ms. Liang is a Princeton in Asia fellow at The Wall Street Journal Asia editorial page.
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