Arts & Entertainment

Hong Kong’s Tiananmen museum reopens in time for 32nd anniversary

Beijing, May 31 (EFE).- Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum, which commemorates the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, has reopened its doors ahead of the 32nd anniversary of the mass killings.

The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China announced Sunday the reopening of the museum, which was forced to close its doors on several occasions over the past nine years due to political pressure and the coronavirus pandemic.

The museum displays photographs taken in 1989, banners used in protests and accessories worn by the Tiananmen Square demonstrators.

It also showcases miniature replicas of the Goddess of Democracy, a 10-meter-high statue erected by Fine Arts students in front of Mao Zedong’s portrait in Tiananmen, which was later destroyed by armored vehicles.

This year, the venue will also host a photography exhibition entitled ‘The 1989 Democratic Movement and Hong Kong,’ which shows images of the massive June 4 vigils in Hong Kong, banned both this year and last year under the pretext of the pandemic.

Part of the exhibition includes a space where flowers can be laid in remembrance of those who died. Some 32 years after the event, there is no official record of those who lost their lives.

Given the sensitivity of the subject, everything related to the Tiananmen massacre is strongly censored by Beijing, including the museum, which has been threatened with closure on several occasions.

The demonstrations began in mid-April 1989 to pay tribute to the then-recently deceased former general secretary of the Communist Party of China Hu Yaobang, an exponent of the party’s reformist wing.

The participants were initially university students calling for political reform and an end to the corruption unleashed by the economic opening up that started the previous decade.

The repression of these protests, which were progressively joined by workers and even Chinese officials and which ended up calling for the democratization of the regime, left an as of yet unknown number of demonstrators dead at the hands of the army, whose troops also suffered several casualties. EFE

jt/mp/jot

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