HONG KONG -- Two months after government inspectors forced its closure, a Hong Kong museum dedicated to preserving the memory of China's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown has reappeared in virtual form.
The June 4th Museum of Memory and Human Rights opened online on Wednesday, after collecting 1.68 million Hong Kong dollars ($216,400) from 1,186 individual donors through crowdfunding in a rare step forward for the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China which has been under intense pressure from the authorities in recent months.
Chairman Lee Cheuk-yan and Vice Chairman Albert Ho, both former legislators, are serving 20- and 18-month prison terms, respectively, for their participation in an unauthorized assembly on Oct. 1, 2019 when the Chinese Communist Party celebrated 70 years in power.
Vice Chairwoman Chow Hang-tung is in custody after being charged with "inciting others to knowingly join an unauthorized assembly" in relation to this past June 4, when the authorities banned the Hong Kong Alliance's annual candlelight memorial vigil for a second year in a row, citing pandemic social controls. A court will consider her latest bail application on Thursday.
The Alliance's June 4th Museum was forced to close on June 2, just four days after it had reopened following a renovation and two days before the anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown.
The Alliance pleaded guilty in court on July 27 to allegations by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department that it lacked proper licenses for the museum and agreed to pay a fine of HK$8,000.
Blocked from its main activities and with half of its remaining 14 standing committee members resigning, the Alliance laid off its last seven staff members last month.
The online June 4th Museum consists of six halls and is available only in Chinese for now. (Screenshot from website) Instead, the design and management of the online museum has been handled by an independent group led by Chang Ping, a Chinese journalist who covered the 1989 events and now resides in Germany, though the location of the servers used to host the site is being kept secret for security reasons.
"The various artistic exhibits that are on display here are not only on the memories and thoughts of the 1989 Democratic Movement, but numerous accounts of resistance activities," Chang tweeted on Wednesday.
The virtual museum consists of six halls. The "Time" hall uses photos and articles to present a chronology of political repression and other events since the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, including a detailed account of the 1989 democracy movement that started as student protests and that ended in a violent government crackdown on June 4.
Another hall records the human cost of the crackdown and other actions by the communist regime. The death toll from the 1989 Tiananmen incident is still unclear, with estimates varying from 200 to at least 10,000. The museum gives the names and personal information of 178 victims, some with portraits.
The Alliance said on Wednesday that it plans to update and add to the virtual exhibits, which for now are only available in Chinese though there are plans for versions in other languages.
The group has been a key target of the authorities' crackdown on dissenting voices in Hong Kong. Luo Huining, Beijing's top representative in Hong Kong, said at an event in June celebrating the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party that the territory's "genuine archenemy" is the one advocating "the end of one-party dictatorship" -- an implicit reference to a key slogan of the Hong Kong Alliance.
After the group's fundraising for the virtual museum, Tian Feilong, an associate professor at the Beihang University Law School in Beijing and the director of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies, said in a newspaper commentary that the planned online exhibits would be "disseminating untrue and inflammatory historical materials to the international community."
He warned this could violate the Hong Kong national security law imposed by Beijing in June 2020.
Hong Kong Alliance Chairman Lee Cheuk-yan launched fundraising for the online museum in June 2020. He is now serving a prison sentence over his role in an illegal assembly. (Photo by Kenji Kawase) Of 138 people arrested under the national security law so far, 76 have been charged, including dozens of opposition politicians and pro-democracy activists. The first trial under the law concluded last week with a former waiter getting a nine-year sentence for incitement to secession and terrorism from an incident in which his motorcycle, bearing a protest banner, collided with police officers.
A number of activists and politicians have gone into exile. Visual artist Kacey Wong, known for political works on topics including the Tiananmen crackdown, announced this week on social media that he had moved to Taiwan. Steve Vines, longtime host of a political talk show on public broadcaster RTHK, told friends and former colleagues on Monday that he had fled to the U.K. to avoid a "white terror sweeping through Hong Kong."
Even media organizations are opting for exile. Online publication Initium Media announced on Tuesday that it had moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to Singapore as conditions had gotten "difficult."
Prospects for the reopening of the Alliance's physical museum are dim but the group said on Wednesday that it "will wait for timing to search for an appropriate means and location to consider reopening."
"We don't know what will happen to this museum after the national security law is promulgated," said Lee, the Alliance's jailed chairman, as he kicked off the fundraising drive for the virtual museum in June 2020.
"We have to preserve it, because we have an uncertain future," he said. "This is also risk control, so what we have now could be preserved."