The decision to take down the “Pillar of Shame,” an enduring symbol of the territory’s pro-democracy movement, was another sign of Beijing’s crackdown. …
The authorities in Hong Kong on Thursday removed a statue that memorialized those killed in the 1989 government massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, the latest crackdown on political dissent in the Chinese territory.
The 26-foot copper statue, known as the “Pillar of Shame,” was created by the Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot in 1996 and shows a pile of naked corpses arranged into what looks like a ghastly obelisk. It commemorates the June 4, 1989, massacre of pro-democracy students and workers around Tiananmen Square by the Chinese government.
The Tiananmen massacre is among the most delicate topics in Chinese politics and has been largely erased from history on the Chinese mainland. But for more than two decades, Mr. Galschiot’s statue was a symbol of the pro-democracy movement in a territory that enjoyed freedoms unimaginable in the mainland.
set up barricades in a standoff with the police.
Early on Friday, two other pieces commemorating Tiananmen disappeared from Hong Kong campuses, according to local news media. The “Goddess of Democracy,” a homage to a monument that the 1989 protesters briefly erected in Beijing during their occupation of the square, was removed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. At Lingnan University, a relief sculpture depicting the events of the 1989 crackdown was taken down.
