The images of the dismantling taken secretly from a balcony ended up on social media. The authorities: “An old dangerous statue”
They entered the campus of the University of Hong Kong at night: a team of workers with yellow helmets, gloves and masks. H.year fenced off the area around “Pillar of Shame” reminiscent of the Tiananmen massacre with high plastic barriers, not for security reasons, but to have no witnesses: at the “crime scene” the police had orders to keep students and the press at bay. But the images, taken secretly from a balcony, are filtered the same, also challenging the Chinese National Security Law which since July 2020 has extinguished the democratic protest in the former British colony.
Thus, the scenes of the dismantling of the statue now run on international social networks: ua copper column 8 meters high, made up of fifty naked bodies, crushed by an oppressive force like that of the Chinese tanks that on June 4, 1989 they had swept away students calling for a decent government in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. A shameful stain on the Party-State, and for this the statue was named «Pillar of Shame», Pillar of Shame. Donated by Danish artist Jens Galschiot, the memorial pyramid arrived in Hong Kong in 1997, just weeks before the city was returned by British colonizers to the People’s Republic of China.
For twenty-four years sculpture had been the only memorial in Chinese territory of the sacrifice of thousands of young people killed in one night in Beijing. The principle applied in Hong Kong “One country two systems”, which formally still lasts, but in reality it has been canceled by the Chinese National Security Law and by the trickle of arrests for subversion and secessionism that have silenced the anti-Communist opposition in the last two years. A few days ago a Hong Kong court sentenced Jimmy Lai, the publisher whose free newspaper Apple Daily was suffocated and closed in the summer: his fault, having participated in the last vigil in memory of Tiananmen on 4 June 2020. Jimmy Lai from the cell wrote: “If remembering those dead is a crime, I am proud to share the glory of those young people who shed their blood.”
The statue still remained on the campus of the city’s oldest university and students still had their photograph taken in front of them on important occasions, such as graduation. THEacceptable in the new “patriotic” course imposed in Hong Kong. The order to remove it had already arrived in October. Without the climate of fear in Hong Kong, thousands of students would have gathered on campus to defend the symbol. But now no one has challenged the new repressive norms; as a precaution the workers were sent in the middle of the night. The rectorate announced that “the decision to dismantle the old statue was made on the basis of legal advice and assessing the risk for the university. We were also worried about the fragility of the work ». A hypocritical motivation. The ‘Pillar of Shame’, cut and wrapped in a white tarp, was dragged away like a corpse. “A brutal end, I’m shocked,” said the sculptor Galschiot.
December 23, 2021 (change December 23, 2021 | 23:00)
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