“Just another day.” For thirty-four years, June Fourth has not been just another day for those in China who remember the protests of 1989 and mourn those whose lives were ended or irrevocably changed in the violent crackdown that ended them. Nor is June Fourth just another day for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): it’s a sensitive day, a day to monitor and repress and silence with extra care. And in recent years that repression has grown, spreading from mainland China into Hong Kong, where the day is no longer marked with a large public assembly expressing shared sorrow at what was lost. Small, personal expressions of memory and resistance have taken its place.
This year, the Hong Kong-based Cha journal asked contributors from around the world to reflect on June 4, 2023 and share how it was—or was not—just another day in their lives. Cha editor Tammy Lai-Ming Ho explained the outline of this mass exercise:
I imagine some will take this as a provocation to be political, but I’d also be very happy to read pieces that don’t touch on politics, history, memory, and suffering. What does that day look like for different people in different parts of the world?
The responses are wide-ranging and thought-provoking; read them here.
Back in 2014, I visited a small but excellent museum in Hong Kong that was dedicated to preserving and sharing memories of the 1989 protests and crackdown. Political repression in Hong Kong forced the museum to close in 2021, and a new iteration has just opened in New York. Amy Hawkins reports for The Guardian about how even New York may not be not far enough to escape pressure from Beijing: the first venue the institution approached turned them down for unspecified reasons, and local Chinese groups have protested against the museum. Council on Foreign Relations fellow Ian Johnson writes at CFR’s website about how the New York location can play a role in uniting various generations of Chinese activists and critics of the Party-state under Xi Jinping:
For several weeks before the official opening, the space also hosted discussions among young people about China’s future course. This is the sort of dialogue between the generations that the museum hopes to foster, one of the 1989 student leaders, Wang Dan, told me.
James T. Areddy and Liyan Qi have a related story, at the Wall Street Journal, on “how America’s biggest city has become the main stage globally to campaign against Beijing’s Communist Party leadership.”
Hawkins also has a Guardian article that relates the not-so-curious case of Beijing’s missing bridge. Last October, a brave protester hung banners criticizing Xi Jinping and the CCP on Sitong Bridge; now, Baidu maps declares “No related places were found” when users search for the name of the bridge. Given Tiananmen Square’s centrality to Communist Party pageantry over the decades, that location wouldn’t be so easily disappeared.
The Washington Post has a short photo feature that shows Hong Kong’s June Fourth protest/vigil across several years, concluding with the pro-Beijing “carnival” staged at Victoria Park this year. Christian Shepherd and Theodora Yu report on that carnival for the WaPo, with photos by Laurel Chor. At the New York Times, Tiffany May writes about the enforced amnesia in Hong Kong, where city leader John Lee directed anyone thinking of participating in memorial events that “everybody should act in accordance with the law and think of what they do, so as to be ready to face the consequences.”
The politics of remembrance also received extensive coverage by the Hong Kong Free Press, which considered the legality of memorializing June Fourth, described the cognitive dissonance of seeing a carnival celebrating CCP rule take place in Victoria Park, and reported on those who were detained for attempting to commemorate the victims of Party-state repression.
The annual June Fourth vigil is almost certainly over in Hong Kong, but memorial events continue in Taiwan. Brian Hioe attended Taipei’s event and writes about it for New Bloom magazine, remarking that despite periods of heavy rain, this year’s gathering “was larger in scale than commemorations in preceding years.”
While not the focus of this Sinica Podcast episode, their recent interview with Mike Chinoy, longtime CNN correspondent in China, devotes a portion to his experience covering the Beijing demonstrations in spring 1989, including the logistics involved in getting reports back to CNN headquarters in Atlanta. On a related note, Chinoy produced a video series entitled “Assignment: China” that includes a 2014 episode about American journalists reporting on Tiananmen Square.
Xi Jinping at the Chinese Communist Party emphasize that the job of state media is to provide “correct public opinion guidance.” At China Media Project, analyst David Bandurski traces how that understanding of media work developed after 1989:
For the hardliners who prevailed in that fateful political moment, the upheaval that spring was first and foremost a failure of media policy. And that perceived failure would shape the Party’s approach to media and information for decades to come, right through Xi Jinping’s undisguised declaration of media subservience in 2016.
Feature photo: June Fourth vigil at Victoria Park in Hong Kong, June 4, 2014.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 
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