About 3,000 people gathered at events in Taipei yesterday for an annual candlelight vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, a brutal crackdown by Chinese authorities on a student-led demonstration in Beijing on June 4 36 years ago.
A candlelight vigil organized by the New School for Democracy and other human rights groups began at 7pm on Democracy Boulevard outside Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, with the theme "Resist Transnational Repression, Defy Totalitarianism."
At about 8pm, organizers announced that about 3,000 people had attended the event, which featured brief speeches by human rights advocates from Taiwan and China, including Hong Kong, as well as other nations.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
Holding electronic candles in the rain, participants — many of them Hong Kongers living in Taiwan — observed 64 seconds of silence at about 8:30pm to mourn those who lost their lives in the crackdown.
Among those who spoke, Wu Renhua (吳仁華), a Chinese academic and survivor of the massacre, said that he would never forget the sight of five bodies lying outside a building at the China University of Political Science and Law — students who had been crushed by tanks.
“I knelt in front of the bodies and wept," he said. “In my heart, I kept telling myself: Never forget.”
Wu said he has been attending the annual vigil in Taipei since 2018 and has often been asked by Taiwanese: "The massacre happened in Beijing — why should people in Taiwan or Taiwanese civil groups commemorate it?"
Wu said his response is that "human rights have no borders," and that as Taiwan underwent a democratic transformation after the Martial Law era, it should care about the Tiananmen Square Massacre — a major human rights catastrophe that shocked the world.
The commemoration highlights the values of democracy that Taiwan holds and "exposes the brutality of the Chinese Communist Party's [CCP] authoritarian system," he said.
As a first-time participant at the vigil, 24-year-old student Lin Chan-wei (林辰韋) told reporters that he feels deep sorrow whenever he sees footage or photographs showing how "the CCP used guns and tanks to crush and shoot its own people" during the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
There was once a possibility that China could have been more democratic than Taiwan, but after a series of brutal crackdowns and the suppression of civic movements, "China has become what it is today: a country with no freedom of speech at all," Lin said.
"What is regrettable about the democratic movement in China is that it seems to have collapsed just before the break of dawn," he said.
As for the significance of Taiwan holding events to commemorate June 4, Lin said that the nation stands in solidarity with the rare, but extant human rights movements across the Taiwan Strait.
Ivan Choi (蔡智豪), a Hong Konger living in Taiwan who was a volunteer worker at the event, said he had attended candlelight vigils in Hong Kong for years before self-exiling to Taiwan in 2019 due to his involvement in the territory's mass protests that year.
For years, groups advocating democracy in Hong Kong held annual vigils in Victoria Park on June 4, drawing tens of thousands of attendees.
However, Hong Kong authorities banned the event in 2020, citing COVID-19 concerns.
Since the imposition of the Hong Kong national security law on June 30, 2020, no large-scale candlelight vigil has been held in the territory to commemorate June 4.
"Maybe because I was a frontline protester [in Hong Kong], these images [of the massacre] hit me especially hard... I just keep asking myself — how could they be so cruel?" said Choi, 26.
Asked about Taiwan's role in commemorating June 4, Choi said he appreciates the nation for approaching the incident with a special focus on exposing the truth behind human rights violations and using it as a warning.
"To remind people that Taiwan is still under threat from China and to help young people see [the Chinese regime for] what it really is," he added.
In addition to the event near Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Hong Kongers in Taipei held a separate candlelight vigil at 228 Peace Memorial Park, with about 100 people attending.
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