Around 200 people gathered outside the Chinese Embassy in London on 4 June evening, lighting candles to mark the 37th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. The vigil took place under the shadow of an impending verdict in Hong Kong against former leaders of the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance, with demonstrators calling for the immediate release of Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung.
As dusk fell, the crowd defied Beijing’s sweeping security apparatus by chanting slogans now criminalised as “seditious” in Hong Kong, including “End one-party dictatorship” and “Hold those responsible for the massacre to account.”
The gathering brought together a broad coalition of exiles and activists from mainland China and Hong Kong, alongside British civil society figures and representatives from Tibetan and Uyghur rights organisations.
Christopher Mung, the Executive Director of the Hong Kong Labour Rights Monitor, told the crowd that the authorities in Hong Kong were effectively putting memory itself on trial in a bid to rewrite history.
“The candlelight shining across the world tonight sends a clear message to the regime: you will not succeed,” Mung said. “They cannot erase our memory, nor can they extinguish the candlelight that reflects humanity’s conscience.”
Mung paid tribute to former Alliance leaders Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, both currently imprisoned in Hong Kong for refusing to abandon their defence of the truth. Quoting Chow’s own defiant courtroom testimony, he reminded the crowd that while the Chinese Communist Party may appear omnipotent, “it cannot lead our conscience.” He then led the crowd in a chant: “Commemoration is not a crime. Fighting for democracy is not a crime.”
Wang Chao-hua, a student leader who fled China after being placed on Beijing’s “most wanted” list in 1989, read a poignant poem framing 4 June as a day of both mourning and enduring resistance. She condemned Deng Xiaoping and the senior leadership who ordered the massacre, as well as the decades of state-sponsored repression inflicted on the victims’ families.
The massacre, Wang argued, did not silence dissent but instead initiated a decades-long struggle for justice. The presence of the dead, she added, still lingers on Chang’an Avenue, in Tiananmen Square, and even within the spaces of social media posts routinely scrubbed by state censors.
Shao Jiang, another survivor of the 1989 movement, noted that this year also marked the 60th anniversary of the launch of the Cultural Revolution—the turbulent era into which many of the 1989 student generation were born. He recalled Xiong Zhiming, a 20-year-old student shot dead during the crackdown, whose parents had hoped he would learn from China’s painful history to help build a better future.
“Change is never a gift from those in power,” Shao said, reflecting on nearly four decades of tightening authoritarian rule. “It is won through resistance.”
‘A Candle Is What Beijing Fears’
The deep connection between the legacy of Tiananmen and the collapse of Hong Kong’s freedoms was a central theme of the night. Chole Cheung, a media manager for the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation who is currently wanted under a Hong Kong national security law bounty, described 4 June as the bedrock of the city’s political awakening.
For decades, Hong Kong was the only place on Chinese soil where mass commemorations were permitted. “Now we have lived through it,” Cheung said, pointing to the empty spaces where the Victoria Park vigils once took place and the cells where dissidents are now held.
“The Chinese Communist Party is one of the most powerful governments in the world,” she said. “It has the police, prisons, propaganda, surveillance, money and influence everywhere. Yet it is still afraid of a single candle, because a candle speaks words that power cannot control.
“A candle says, ‘I remember.’ A candle says, ‘You are lying.’ A candle says, ‘The dead will not be forgotten.’ A candle says, ‘Even if you silence an entire city, you still have not won.'”
The evening also highlighted how the playbook used in Beijing in 1989 has since expanded across China’s peripheral regions. Rahima Mahmut, executive director of Stop Uyghur Genocide, recalled her days as a student in Dalian, traveling to Beijing to join the euphoric calls for an open society before fleeing home on 2 June just ahead of the tanks.
Mahmut argued that the very same political system that crushed the students later turned its machinery on Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, and human rights lawyers, calling for international accountability for what she described as mass atrocities and genocide.
Thuntsok Norbu, chair of the Tibetan Community in Britain, drew parallels to 1989, noting that Beijing’s military crackdown in Beijing coincided with intensified martial law in Tibet. He hit out at China’s “Ethnic Unity Law,” warning that policies forcing minority children into Mandarin-language boarding schools amounted to state-enforced cultural erasure. He urged Tibetans, Taiwanese, and Hong Kongers to maintain a united front against Beijing’s expanding surveillance state.
Lending institutional weight from British civil society, Daniel Randall of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) urged the global trade union movement to use its leverage within international supply chains to push back against exploitation.
Randall noted that the RMT had passed formal motions standing in solidarity with Hong Kong’s crushed independent labour unions and opposing the repression of Uyghurs. Despite Beijing’s socialist rhetoric, he argued, the regime had overseen hyper-industrialisation by ruthlessly suppressing labour rights and exploiting its working class.