Hong Kong’s key role in helping Tiananmen students flee

China’s Communist Party rulers have for 30 years attempted to suppress all memory within China of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters, who were mainly students.

But Hong Kong continues to commemorate the events, despite recent pressures from Beijing on its own freedoms, and new information has emerged on how Hong Kong students helped finance the Beijing students' protest activities and their later efforts to flee to Hong Kong and beyond after the crackdown.

According to the organisers, more than 180,000 people turned out for a candlelit vigil on 4 June in Hong Kong to remember those who died in 1989. It is the only Chinese city to publicly observe the Tiananmen anniversary on such a scale, and was addressed by video link by Zhang Xiangling, a member of the Tiananmen Mothers group in Beijing who lost offspring during the massacre.

In advance of the vigil, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said Hong Kong could organise such a commemoration because it “is a very free society. We uphold and safeguard the rights and freedoms of individuals in Hong Kong. So today, if there are public gatherings to express their views and feelings on a particular historic incident, we fully respect those views.”

Around 50,000 attended the annual vigils in the first two decades after 1989, before attendance began to drop off as memories faded. However, the 25th anniversary turnout in 2014 was as high as 125,000, putting paid to the notion that the Tiananmen massacre is irrelevant to Hong Kong youth born after 1989.

A University of Hong Kong survey conducted in late May by the university’s Public Opinion Programme found that among young people aged 18-29, some 83% felt the Chinese government acted wrongly over the massacre; only 2% said it did the right thing.

Just over two-thirds of young people or 68% said Beijing students were in the right, and three-quarters of young Hong Kong respondents said there should be a reversion of the official stance on the crackdown.

The Public Opinion Programme, which has surveyed Hong Kong people’s views on the crackdown over almost three decades, despite coming under pressure from pro-Beijing factions in the past, is due to be spun off from the university to safeguard its independence.

Annual vigil

The 4 June vigil was organised by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which was set up in May 1989 after martial law was declared in Beijing as more and more students took to the streets.

Over one million Hong Kong people – in the then British Colony of just over 5 million inhabitants – marched in support of the student-led movement in China. The alliance has organised the open-air vigil annually since then.

The Tiananmen massacre had a huge emotional impact on Hong Kong which saw mass protests with many sporting black ribbons of mourning as the events in Beijing sowed fear and mistrust as Hong Kong looked to handover to Chinese rule in 1997 with trepidation. Emigration from Hong Kong to the West rocketed.

Conversely, China became more aware of Hong Kong as a possible base to ‘subvert China’.

Lee Cheuk-yan, alliance secretary, former Hong Kong legislator and trade union leader, who was 32 in 1989, travelled to Tiananmen Square to deliver donations raised during a Hong Kong benefit concert to the Chinese student protesters. “The fourth of June has everything to do with today; it’s a contemporary struggle because it’s the same oppressor, it’s the same dictatorship, it’s the same logic of authoritarian rule,” he said this week.

An unusually blunt editorial published on 4 June in the English-language Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post said: “Whether swept under the carpet across the border [in Mainland China] or commemorated in Hong Kong, 4 June weighs heavily in both places.

“It remains influential in perceptions of China, thanks partly to the lasting impact in Hong Kong, where the crackdown is still a factor in the discord between local [Hong Kong] democrats and Beijing.

“Beijing may never have been happy with Hong Kong’s role in the democracy movement. But until it revisits the [Tiananmen] verdict, it has to live with the fact that tonight’s vigil is a living symbol to the world of Hong Kong’s right to freedom of speech and assembly under [China’s policy for Hong Kong of] ‘one country, two systems’.”

Hong Kong assistance to Beijing students

Hong Kong as a British Colony then, as now, enjoyed greater freedoms than on the Chinese mainland, and had a particular role to play in assisting students in Beijing.

In 1989, dozens of Hong Kong’s university students travelled to the Chinese capital to support the Beijing students, bringing supplies and donations, much of it gathered by the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS).

Hong Kong student organisations worked long hours faxing copies of reports from the uncensored Hong Kong press to organisations on the mainland, including Chinese government offices to ‘spread the word’ about the Beijing students’ demands for more accountability and democracy.

Some of the details of the funding provided by HKFS to students in Beijing only filtered out recently.

According to accounts recently revealed to the South China Morning Post, some US$1.4 million was raised in total by HKFS for the student movement in China, particularly for those jailed, for the families of those killed in the crackdown, for fleeing dissidents and other activities, including helping dissidents start businesses relating to the crackdown.

According to records, for example, a large sum was handed to graduate students at Beijing’s Renmin University to fund underground magazines that circulated at universities in the Chinese capital during and after the crackdown.

After the Chinese military cleared Tiananmen Square, when the Beijing security authorities continuously broadcast the names and photographs of the most-wanted leaders of the 1989 movement, about a third of the amount raised by HKFS was used to help dissidents flee China.

This continued for several years until just before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, as some released from jail sentences then fled China.

Underground escape route

In 1989 Hong Kong had set up the underground escape route known as ‘Operation Yellowbird’ to assist students out of Beijing and other Chinese cities, involving dozens of sympathisers in Hong Kong and on the mainland, and establishing a network of safe houses along the secret route to Hong Kong. They helped some 150 students and dissidents flee the Chinese mainland.

Those assisted by ‘Operation Yellowbird’ included students on Beijing’s most-wanted list: Wang Dan, now in the United States, and Wu’er Kaixi, now in Taiwan, and also Liu Xiaobo, one of the last to leave Tiananmen Square in 1989 and later a Nobel laureate. Jailed four times for his role in 1989, Liu later died in custody in 2017.

After the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, HKFS accounts relating to the Chinese pro-democracy movement were sent to Canada for ‘safekeeping’ but were recently on display at Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum, which opened this year.

A lesson in dealing with the Chinese regime

Despite having no experience or direct connection with the events in Beijing in 1989, Roy Li, a student at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told local radio that for Hong Kong the events of 1989 are “a beacon that could teach us how to strive for democracy or protect the remaining democracy and rule of law in Hong Kong. So it is a great teacher to all of the democracy fighters.”

It is important for Hong Kong people “because we are dealing with the same government – the PRC regime”, he said.

“The 4 June incident teaches us a lesson that they will kill when they want to or they have to.”

A Joint Student Forum would be set up on the 4 June incident with representatives from different Hong Kong universities, Li said.

Hong Kong students now watching replays of the 1989 events find similarities in the Beijing students’ discussions with the 2014 student-led pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, when people occupied the streets for weeks over their demand for universal suffrage to elect Hong Kong’s chief executive. The restrictions on Hong Kong suffrage were themselves imposed by Chinese negotiators in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre.

“There are many similar discussions on how we can fight for democracy and this is a really great lesson for us,” said Apple Siu, a student at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University.

Last vigil for dissidents?

Hong Kong’s large turnout comes against the backdrop of a controversy over plans by the pro-Beijing Hong Kong government to allow extraditions to the Chinese mainland for the first time.

Alliance members said this year’s vigils may be the last time exiled mainland dissidents can safely attend, in light of the new extradition laws expected to be passed in the coming weeks by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council.

"In the past, those dissidents were able to come to Hong Kong and to take part in the commemorative activities. They were not afraid of being extradited to China because there was no such arrangement," said Albert Ho, alliance chairman and a former Hong Kong legislator.

“In due course ... if they are allowed to come to Hong Kong, they may face the risk of being arrested and subjected to extradition.”

Hong Kong has already begun to bar some dissidents. On Sunday, the alliance said Feng Congde, a 1989 student leader and a student at Peking University at the time, was denied entry into Hong Kong. Feng, who is exiled abroad, was turned away after having travelled from Germany via Japan to attend the vigil.

The alliance still calls for China to revise its characterisation of the students’ movement as a counter-revolutionary uprising at the vigil.

But on 2 June China’s defence minister, General Wei Fenghe, told a regional security forum in Singapore that the Tiananmen incident was “a political turbulence and the central government took measures to stop the turbulence, which is a correct policy”, adding that because of the Chinese government's action “China has enjoyed stability and development”.

In 1989 University World News Asia editor Yojana Sharma was Hong Kong correspondent for the United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, covering the events and their aftermath from Beijing, other Chinese cities and Hong Kong.