🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
HONG KONG (AP) — As the 35th anniversary of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square crackdown neared, Rowena He, a prominent scholar of that bloody chapter of modern China’s history, was busy flying between the United States, Britain and Canada to give a series of talks.
In Hong Kong, once a beacon of commemorative freedom, the massive June 4 annual vigil that mourned the victims for decades has vanished, a casualty of the city’s clampdown on dissidents following huge anti-government protests in 2019.
However, attempts to silence commemorative efforts have failed to erase the harrowing memories from the minds of a generation of liberal-minded Chinese in the years after tanks rolled into the heart of Beijing to break up weeks of student-led protests that had spread to other cities and were seen as a threat to Communist Party rule.
As of early May, its board chair Wang Dan, also a leading former student leader of the Tiananmen protests, estimated the New York museum attracted about 1,000 people, including Chinese immigrants, U.S. citizens and Hong Kongers.
Alison Landsberg, a memory studies scholar at George Mason University in Virginia, said that overseas efforts carry the potential to inspire people from other places who are facing their own challenges in the pursuit of democracy.
The play, produced by Lit Ming-wai, part of the Hong Kong diaspora who moved to the U.K. after the enactment of the 2020 security law, tells the story of an elderly couple who wish to properly mourn their son who died in 1989.