At the forefront of their protest is a museum marking the events of June 1989. It’s the first in the world and has been opened in defiance of Beijing.
Information about Tiananmen is suppressed in mainland China, but founder Lee Cheuk-yan is determined to spread the word.
“Many of them do not know what happened, especially the younger generation,” he tells David O’Shea in a report for tonight’s Dateline.
“Those who are the older ones, they know what happened, but many of them are not from Beijing, so they never really know what happened in Beijing.”
Mr Lee is also an MP, but is banned from travelling to China, and says he’s being closely watched.
“All my phones are bugged, my email regularly gets hacked and of course we are very closely monitored by the Chinese Government,” he says.
The museum also has the backing of human rights campaign group Amnesty International.
“Chinese Government, they are not allowing any form of conversation, any kind of debate, in fact they are trying to hide the memories,” says the group’s Secretary General, Salil Shetty.
“What we have seen in the last few months is very worrying. We’ve had a series of key activists, key leaders, who’ve been arrested, who are linked somehow to the Tiananmen Square memorial,” he says. “But unfortunately they have not even stopped at that, we have now seen a much wider crackdown.”
Although it retains its autonomy, campaigners say Hong Kong is increasingly feeling that pressure.
“You can feel an atmosphere of very much people want to please China, especially if you have a monetary interest in pleasing China, so the self-censorship arises very much from self-interest,” Lee Cheuk-yan tells David.
“It’s a gradual strangling of the freedom that we have… if you don’t have freedom of the press you don’t have freedom of expression, and then when you look at the press, they all belong to some tycoons, and those tycoons, businessmen, their business is in China, not in Hong Kong.”
The Editor in Chief of the outspoken Ming Pao Daily, Kevin Lau, was recently attacked by two men armed with a meat cleaver. Former journalist and now politician Claudia Mo says it was an assault on press freedom.
“It’s absolutely under threat,” she says. “The self-censorship is not just creeping in, it is becoming very blatant.”
“I used to be a cautious optimist, but now I’m getting more and more pessimistic by the day with the Communist ideology.”
Several arrests have been made, but no one knows for sure who was behind the attack.
Some in China say it’s time to move on from the events in Tiananmen Square, but Lee Cheuk-yan disagrees.
“China, economically it may be improving, but then political freedom, democracy, human rights are all in regression,” he tells David.
“So to remember June 4th is not staying in the past… the demand of the students at that time is very much relevant today.”
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