The Hong Kong authorities have changed the markings of street lamps with numbers associated with the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, reported the independent website Hong Kong Free Press. According to the official explanation of the local authorities, it was only about “renovating” the poles.
As reported by the independent website Hong Kong Free Press, in August there were nine lampposts in the city with serial numbers containing the string “8964” and seven with the string “6489”. The registration list updated this month shows that all 16 lamps now have new markings.
Authorities said this was because they had been “renovated.” However, according to the website, these numbers were changed because they referred to the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing on June 4, 1989. These two number combinations, “8964” and “6489”, are often used to refer to the date of the bloody crackdown on protests. The Chinese army then killed, according to various estimates, even thousands of gathered civilians.
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China erases the memory of the massacre
IN China on the mainland, any mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre is censored, and until recently Hong Kong was the only Chinese territory where commemoration of the victims of this massacre was tolerated. However, since 2020, after Beijing imposed the national security law on Hong Kong, civil liberties and the right to mention the events of 1989 have also been effectively restricted there.
In 2021, monuments commemorating the victims of the protests in Beijing were removed from the grounds of two Hong Kong universities. Since then, publications referring to this event have been removed from the shelves of libraries and bookstores, and activists who tried to pay tribute to the victims despite the decisions of the authorities have been arrested and sentenced.
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