標題: Remembering Tiananmen in Hong Kong [打印本頁] 作者: soli 時間: 2010-6-5 00:07 標題: Remembering Tiananmen in Hong Kong
Remembering Tiananmen in Hong Kong
June 4, 2010 11:43pm | Share
On June 4th, the 21st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong commemorated the dead. Last night, I visited the park where the annual ceremony takes place - and where thousands of people carried candles in memory of the dead.
Earlier in the day, I had lunch with Jasper Tsang Yok-Sing, the leader of Hong Kong’s largest pro-Beijing party, the DAB, and the president of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. I expected him to gloss over the events of 21 years ago. But not a bit of it. He seemed eager to discuss his painful memories of that day. He was a headmaster at the time in a pro-Beijing school in Hong Kong - and every morning in the months before the killings, the teachers and school children had discussed the news of the demonstrations in Beijing. “We never believed a government we so trusted would turn its troops against the people,” he recalled. The morning of the massacre was a Sunday - but teachers and pupils had headed spontaneously for the school. “We gathered there and we all cried.” Recalling that day, 21 years on, Mr Tsang choked up, wiped away a tear and struggled to continue speaking. Eventually he just said - “It’s not easy, even now.”
As a Beijing loyalist, Mr Tsang does not go to the ceremony in Victoria Park. But he does not make much effort to hide his feelings. When I asked him if anybody in his party believed that the Chinese government had taken the right decision on June 4th, 1989, he paused and then said, “there may be a few.”
I wondered how he could reconcile his leadership of a party that, as he himself puts it, is seen as Beijing’s “mouthpiece” in Hong Kong with his evident horror at the events of 1989. He seems to have a mixture of motives. He had joined the pro-Beijing movement in Hong Kong, out of a mixture of Chinese patriotism and resentment at British colonial rule. His teenage brother had been imprisoned for two years, under British rule, for handing out anti-British leaflets at school in Hong Kong, during the Cultural Revolution. In the late 1960s, Mr Tsang was a student leftist - while Americans students demonstrated against Vietnam and the French occupied the Sorbonne, he decided to join the struggle against British colonialism.
His belief that Hong Kong’s fate must lie with China meant that, after Tiananmen, he stuck with the pro-Beijing movement. “My party, the DAB had a role to play, to show the Chinese government they need not fear Hong Kong. That there are people here who they can work with and that we can be a viable pro-Beijing force in elections.”
Asked by my colleague Tom Mitchell, how he intended to commemorate June 4th, since he wasn’t going to the demonstration, he replied - “Long ago I told myself that the best way to commemorate June 4th - and make sure those who sacrificed their lives did not do so in vain - is to do what I can to help my country within Hong Kong become more liberal and democratic.” While many of his political opponents in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement deride Beijing’s promise to introduce universal suffrage for the elections for chief executive of the territory in 2017 - ( because all candidates will have to first be vetted by an official committee) - Mr Tsang argues that it is a big step towards a fully-democratic system. Even if the candidates are officially-approved, he says, they will have to compete for the votes of the whole population.
He also insists that young members of his party must be allowed to discuss Tiananmen frankly - “We owe our younger members an explanation of what we think about the events of June 4th.”
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“My party, the DAB had a role to play, to show the Chinese government they need not fear Hong Kong. That there are people here who they can work with and that we can be a viable pro-Beijing force in elections.”
以前無諗過﹐但如果香港無所謂既親建制派﹐全部係反中共既﹐我相信香港現在絕唔會有30席直選﹐普選特首就更無可能﹐因為信唔過香港人。作者: ricrick 時間: 2010-6-5 01:25
