uncensored information about the event.
In China the encroachments continue. The year Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo died after having been imprisonned several times in China, and artists like Ai Weiwei and Badiucao are exiled from China. But these prominent artists are only the tip of the iceberg, there are thousands of artists, environmental activists and others imprisoned. And all they have done is defend their most basic human rights.
Thousands of Chinese students are today studying at universities and other institutions in the West. Most of them do not even know their own history due to the censorship. You can help remedy this.
Therefore, we invite all pro-democracy institutions, scholars and working colleagues to download and print out this documentation or put it on a USB flash drive. Place it on the shelves of libraries and hand it out as a gift to Chinese students on the 4th of June, the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.
This way we can contribute to preserve the memory of the victims, and maybe inspire a new generation of Chineseto see democracy as a possibility in China.
We call on everybody to support this initiative and to mail this appeal to other institutions of education where there are Chinese students, or others who might be interested in preserving and distributing knowledge about the Tiananmen massacre.
What’s going on in Hong Kong
It seems that China’s suppression of free speech still has a solid grip, also in Hong Kong. Galschiot is just one of many critics who have been denied entry. So the city is deprived of a cultural exchange that is taken for granted in all open democratic societies. The expulsions are a blatant violation of the principle of ‘One country – Two systems’ that was guaranteed as part of Hong Kong’s reunion with China in ‘97.
In 2013 Galschiøt managed to enter Hong Kong to repair ‘The Pillar of Shame’. In these very years Hong Kong stands on the precipice of realizing the 1997 agreements with China, to develop a real democracy in Hong Kong. But they are under a lot of pressure from non-democratic forces. The results of these negotiations are crucial for the future of Hong Kong.
Throughout 2019 and 2020 massive demonstrations in Hong Kong have taken place. They fight for their basic human rights that China promised Hong Kong’s citizens when they took over the country in 1997.
The peaceful demonstrations have been welcomed with comprehensive violent force from Hong Kong’s police, and the citizens have been defending themselves agains the police´s pepperspray cannisters with simple umbrellas.
A functioning democracy on Chinese ground, even though only in Hong Kong, is an extremely important symbol for the more than one billion living in mainland China.
