Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Square museum forced to close two days ahead of memorial

On June 1, Hong Kong officials from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) visited the museum in the working-class area of Mong Kok and accused the organizers of operating a “place of public entertainment” illegally.

“Our department recently received a complaints that someone in a unit in a commercial building on Mong Kok Road was operating an entertainment venue without the required license,” the FEHD told CNN in a statement.

They added that this license is required for all businesses that “entertain people” regardless of whether they charge money as an entry fee. The museum was free to visit.

The vigil was canceled last year due to the coronavirus outbreak, and on Saturday a court sided with a police decision to cancel the event again this year, for the same reason.

The next day, the June 4 Museum’s organizers, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (usually just called The Hong Kong Alliance), invited patrons to lay flowers at the museum to mark the day.

The museum’s chairman, Lee Cheuk-yan, saw trouble coming. Back in March, he gave CNN a tour of the museum and predicted that the NSL could soon close it for good.

“(The NSL) is always like a knife hanging around your neck,” Lee said. “We don’t know when it would chop down on us.”

The power of objects

This year, Lee will spend June 4 behind bars. In April, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for organizing and participating in unauthorized government protests in 2019. He faces further charges for other actions.

Before he was sentenced, Lee met with CNN after a long day in West Kowloon’s high court. He was in remarkably good spirits, despite the looming threat of a jail term.

He walked CNN through a few of his favorite pieces on display. Many were donated to the museum by the Tiananmen Mothers, a Chinese activist group composed of parents and loved ones of people killed during the June 4 protests.

The most moving pieces are the personal ones — a Peking University T-shirt signed by activists, a bullet pulled from the leg of a labor organizer, a camera owned by a student who was shot while snapping pictures of the day’s events, and photographs the same student’s parents had developed posthumously.

“The museum is only part of our work,” Lee explained. He knows that movements don’t just happen in a single day, despite the museum’s name. “We are trying to firstly organize activity events around the June 4 commemoration. So, every year the June 4 commemoration vigil, and also the march before that. Apart from the June 4 commemoration, we also supported a campaign for the release of dissidents inside China.”

In response, the Hong Kong Alliance released a statement on Twitter confirming that it was forced to cancel the vigil. However, it added, “in spite of this, the alliance continues to believe that no matter how much the regime engages in oppression, the candlelight will never disappear as long as people remember.”

The June 4 Museum’s spring exhibit was about how much the events of Tiananmen Square mirror the protests of the past few years in Hong Kong. Both movements were led by young people, and sought to push back against China’s ruling Communist Party and against media censorship.

Lee says that some museum guests simply want to be alone with their thoughts. Others ask questions or defend China’s actions.

The man behind the mission

Lee was born in Shanghai in 1957 to a family whose roots are in Guangdong Province, which borders Hong Kong. He moved to Hong Kong as a young man while the city was still a British colony — first to attend university, then to work as a labor activist.

The Hong Kong Alliance was founded in 1989, galvanized by the June 4 movement. Then, the group’s primary concern was looking ahead to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese, and how that would affect life and politics in the city.

“At that time, the people of Hong Kong were very much mobilized and moved by the students in China,” he explains of the burgeoning pro-democracy movements happening on the mainland then. “Personally, I was of course very glad that people in China started to fight for democracy. If there is democracy in China, then there’s for sure democracy in Hong Kong.”

The Hong Kong Alliance is often labeled as anti-Chinese, which Lee dislikes. Despite spending most of his adult life in Hong Kong, he very much considers himself Chinese, regularly mentioning how much he loves China and is proud of his heritage.

What the alliance wants isn’t an end to China. Its stated goal is an end to the single-party rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and an opening of the country to different viewpoints and political parties.

The June 4 protests in 1989 were part of a movement that had been growing across China calling for exactly that. The climactic events of Tiananmen Square began on April 15, after the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, a reform-minded former CCP leader who had been ousted a few years earlier. When Hu died, a group of people — mostly college students from Peking University — gathered in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing to mourn him publicly. That mourning morphed into a cry to action as protesters pushed for governmental reform and a move to democracy.

The single-day action turned into weeks, with some students going on hunger strikes. More people flocked to the square, and the crowds grew bigger and more vocal.

The word “Tiananmen” means “Gate of Heavenly Peace” in Mandarin. As the crowds swelled, the Chinese military marched on the square on June 4, arresting and killing many of the activists.

Today, discussion of those events remains taboo in mainland China. The June 4 Museum in Hong Kong was vital to people remembering that day in the Greater China and beyond.

Travelers from all over the world have visited it, leaving Post-It notes with messages in different languages to make a Lennon Wall like the ones that have popped up around Hong Kong in support of the city’s more recent pro-democracy movement. Some of these, like the one at Hong Kong University, are still up, but others have been removed by police.

Despite the well-wishes from Australia, Finland, Japan and more, some of the most poignant messages were those from Chinese visitors.

“I asked a guy from Beijing, ‘How do you know about our museum?'” Lee recalled asking one mainland guest. “He said, ‘Of course I know about you and the museum, I was the one that censored it. I wrote down your address when I’m censoring your museum.’ And then he came to our museum to visit.”

What happens next

Lee is in prison, still able to communicate with The Hong Kong Alliance and release messages to his supporters through his attorney. His only child has moved abroad, perhaps permanently.

The Hong Kong Alliance worries that if the museum is forced to close permanently, the government may seize its assets, so they are working to digitize the entire collection in both English and Chinese.

“The promised democracy has never materialized,” Lee said, referring to the “One Country, Two Systems” formula promised by Beijing to let the city maintain a high degree of autonomy until 2047, including the introduction of universal suffrage.

But the passage of the National Security Law has all but dashed that hope.

On April 16, Lee greeted a crowd of supporters outside the court as he prepared to begin his prison term. Dressed in a natty button-down shirt, he was also sporting the surgical face mask that is mandatory in public in Hong Kong to guard against coronavirus.

Shortly before being walked to the prison van, the activist referenced an English-language song by the Rogers & Hammerstein duo that has been adopted by the pro-democracy movement.

“I want to dedicate the song ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ to the Hong Kong people. We will walk together even in darkness with hope in our heart,” he said.

Lee’s next public appearance will be on June 11, when he will stand trial for three additional charges of “inciting, organizing and participating in an unauthorized assembly.”

This year, unable to leave his cell, Lee will go on a one-day hunger strike in prison as his personal tribute to June 4.

CNN’s Jadyn Sham contributed reporting.