SNA (Tokyo) — A candlelight vigil to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre was held outside Shinjuku Station on June 4, 2023, but unlike last year’s event, the lead role in organizing the memorial was taken by young mainland Chinese instead of Hongkongers.

In the decades following the violent repression at the end of the 1980s, Hong Kong developed a tradition of memorializing the event, seeing it as a potent call for democratization.

However, since Beijing tightened its grip on former British colony several years ago, these memorials have also been forced to leave the “Special Administrative Regions” of Hong Kong and Macau.

Hongkongers nevertheless maintained their practice of holding the annual memorial overseas.

Last year, a vigil was hosted in Shinjuku by Stand with HK@JPN and several other Hongkonger groups. Black t-shirts and yellow umbrellas–symbols of the 2019 Hong Kong protests–were centrally featured.

“What Beijing did to us in 2019 is essentially the same as what it did in 1989,” asserted William Lee, a Hong Kong activist and cofounder of Stand with HK@JPN. “If we had successfully stopped Beijing back then, things could be different for us now,” he added.

This year’s event, in contrast, was heavily mainland-focused. A variety of posts, banners, and costumes linked the 1989 student protests to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, concentration camps in Xinjiang, and various demonstrations that broke out within the mainland last year. This same group of young mainland Chinese had previously joined last year’s Shibuya Halloween march with costumes which mocked the Chinese Communist Party.

The June 4 event also featured a speech by Zhou Fengsuo, a former student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Lee, whose Hongkonger organization also helped organize this year’s memorial, commented: “I think it is better to let mainland Chinese host the vigil. It is more meaningful.”

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