Farewell to Hong Kong and Its Big Lie

Earlier this month, a few days before I packed up my apartment and left Hong Kong, I made my way across the city to Victoria Park. For decades, the city’s residents would gather there in the thousands on the night of June 4 to commemorate the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a moment of mass collective remembrance for those killed by Chinese forces in Beijing in 1989 and, though less so, a nod to the formative role that the crackdown played in the development of Hong Kong’s own prodemocracy movement. This year, the once-moving scene was entirely stamped out by the city’s more authoritarian turn.

At the park, the heavily equipped police outnumbered the journalists, who themselves outnumbered those there to remember the victims of Tiananmen. I was standing with two other reporters as well as two friends. This put us over the limit of four people allowed together outside under Hong Kong’s COVID policies. I walked away after being warned by police, but I continued typing notes on my phone. The effort was before backing up a few steps.