Word: honge
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...Remembering Tiananmen Square is a task Hong Kong people take seriously. This is the only Chinese city where the incident is openly discussed and publicly remembered. In the summer of 1989, some 1 million people took to the city's streets in support of the students. They've honored them every year since. But remembrance is an amorphous term, especially here. The solemnity of recollection is tempered by anger and fear - anger that China has not acknowledged the incident, and fear that heavy-handed suppression is not a thing of the past. "What happened 20 years ago could happen again...
...20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre comes at a time when Hong Kong's own democracy movement feels threatened. Twelve years after its return to China, the city operates semiautonomously, enjoying a range of rights, but beholden, ultimately, to Beijing. Under a policy called "one country, two systems," residents elect half of their legislators, but Beijing appoints the territory's chief executive. (Read: "China Cracks Down Ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary...
...delicate balance, one that pro-democracy advocates worry is tipping toward Beijing. Last year the Chinese government postponed direct elections in the territory, bumping the date from 2012 to 2017 for the chief executive and to 2020 for the legislature. The move outraged veteran campaigners like Martin Lee, Hong Kong's "Father of Democracy." Lee, recently the target of a foiled assassination plot, says Beijing is buying time, stacking the democratic deck. "They have postponed and postponed," he says. "Hong Kong will not have democracy until Beijing knows they have people...
...fear shared by many here. Pro-democracy groups see Beijing's not-so-invisible hand tightening its grip on the city. In the run-up to the anniversary, two Tiananmen-era dissidents, Xiang Xiaoji and Yang Jianli, were turned away at Hong Kong's airport. The city won't comment, but it denied charges that it kept an immigration blacklist at the behest of Beijing. The incident sparked outrage nonetheless, with critics accusing Hong Kong officials of kowtowing to mainland authorities ahead of the politically sensitive anniversary. (See pictures of Hong Kong...
...Many, including prominent Hong Kong legislator Emily Lau, worry that Beijing is stifling Hong Kong's notoriously raucous press. She points to a new report by Freedom House, an American NGO that tracks freedom-of-the-press issues, which labeled Hong Kong's press corps "free" in 2008, but downgraded it to "partly free" in 2009. The problem, Lau says, is not outright repression but self-censorship. "People are getting too scared to speak...