Did the Chinese learn lessons in rewriting history from the 1921 Tulsa massacre? Not likely. Nevertheless, from The Guardian:
Over the weekend, a diminutive, white-haired woman carrying a yellow umbrella and a homemade cardboard sign saying “32, June 4, Tiananmen’s lament” was arrested on suspicion of taking part in an unlawful assembly. She had been marching along the pavement alone. This Kafkaesque scene happened not in China, but in Hong Kong. The fate of “Granny Wong”, a 65-year-old protest veteran called Alexandra Wong Fung-yiu, underlines the rapidity of Beijing’s clampdown in the city where, just two years ago, 180,000 people attended the annual vigil remembering the 1989 killings in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
This year the Hong Kong vigil has been banned. Anyone gathering at the vigil site in Victoria Park on Friday could face five years in prison. Even publicising the event could lead to one year in jail under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security law, imposed sight unseen at the end of last June following a year of massive pro-democracy demonstrations. Public commemoration has become so risky that one Hong Kong newspaper even suggested writing the digits “64”, to commemorate the date of the protest, on light switches, so that flipping the switch became an act of remembrance. These moves underline the dangerous power of public memory, and how the events of 32 years ago still represent a suppurating sore at the moral heart of China’s Communist party.
This approach seems designed to prevent a rerun of last year, when tens of thousands of Hongkongers defied a Covid-inspired ban to flock to the vigil, where they quietly held candles aloft in socially distanced groups. At least two dozen people, including the newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai and the activist Joshua Wong, have been charged with unauthorised assembly as a result of the gathering, with some sentenced to as much as 10 months in jail. This is just one in a welter of public order offences laid against the territory’s most prominent politicians, lawyers, journalists and unionists, creating a kind of perp walk of conscience through the courtrooms as a generation of activists is criminalised.
Tulsa’s suppression of collective memory after 1921 was so effective that it did not require such draconian measures to “disappear” both the murderous actions of the White mob or the mass graves they filled with the bodies of their Black neighbors.
In its 100th anniversary remembrance of a White mob’s attack on Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, the Washington Post writes:
For decades after the massacre, there was silence about what happened. Few in Tulsa learned about it at school. Or at church. Or at family dinner tables.
The Chinese would like to do the same to memory of the June 4th massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
For a second year, Hong Kong has banned the annual vigil there for the victims (Reuters):
Hong Kong sealed off a park where tens of thousands gather annually to commemorate China’s 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and arrested the vigil’s organiser on Friday, in what activists see as suppression of one of the city’s main symbols of democratic hope.
A blanket of security was thrown over the former British colony to prevent people gathering to light candles for the pro-democracy protesters killed by Chinese troops in Beijing 32 years ago.
Media reported police were conducting stop-and-search checks at three cross-harbour tunnels leading to Hong Kong island, causing long tailbacks during the evening rush hour. Water cannon and armoured vehicles were spotted.
The heightened vigilance from authorities was a marked departure from Hong Kong’s cherished freedoms of speech and assembly, bringing the global financial hub closer in line with mainland China’s strict controls on society, activists say.
Hong Kong’s annual June 4 vigil, the world’s largest, is usually held in Victoria Park, to the east of Hong Kong’s central business district, and is widely seen as a symbol of the semi-autonomous city’s democratic aspirations and desire to preserve its distinct way of life.
This year’s anniversary is the first under a sweeping and contentious national security law Beijing imposed on its freest city last year.
Chinese authorities can inhibit the memorial but not the memory. For that, you’d have to visit Tulsa.