Police patrolling the streets in the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong on June 3, 2024, near Victoria Park where people traditionally gathered annually on June 4 to mourn the victims of China's Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. - AFP
HONG KONG: Police in Hong Kong arrested a woman for chanting slogans on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, using a new domestic national security law for the first time on a protester.
The 68-year-old was suspected of committing an offence with seditious intention, police said in a statement on Tuesday (June 4).
She was arrested near a park in downtown Hong Kong where thousands used to meet every year to mourn pro-democracy protesters killed in Beijing in 1989, until such gatherings ended during the authorities’ campaign against dissent.
The enforcement action represented the first use of a security law fast-tracked in March against a demonstrator, adding to a recent flurry of cases that could redefine where authorities draw the line between acceptable speech and sedition in the once-freewheeling finance hub.
Article 23, as the law is known, was first invoked last week in the arrests of eight people over social media posts about the bloody suppression 35 years ago.
One of them, Chow Hang-tung, a jailed activist who once helped organise the annual commemoration, was accused of making Facebook posts behind bars to incite others to join unlawful activities related to the anniversary this week.
Police didn’t describe the woman detained on June 4 beyond her age and location of her arrest.
Local media have identified her as an Alexandra Wong and video footage showed her being accosted by dozens of officers before she was taken away in a police van.
The activist nicknamed Grandma Wong was seen holding a bunch of flowers and shouting slogans calling to hold authorities accountable for the military clampdown on pro-democracy activists in Beijing, which killed estimated hundreds of civilians.
The extensive efforts to prevent public commemoration of the event were a far cry from what Hong Kong used to allow before China imposed a national security law on the former British colony in 2020, following protests the previous year seen as challenging Beijing’s authority.
For decades, Hong Kong was the only place on Chinese soil where the public could openly mark the occasion. Every year until 2020, activists held a peaceful candlelight memorial in Victoria Park on June 4 for those who died in the Chinese capital in 1989.
On June 4, police arrested three more people for disorderly conduct nearby and briefly detained and released five others, including a Swiss and a Japanese national, according to the authorities.
Foreign diplomats in the city observed the occasion with social media posts and visits to the site of the discontinued annual gathering in acts Beijing criticised as “provocations”.
The US consulate lined electric candles along windows of its building. The United Kingdom posted on X a photo of a phone with its torch turned on under the Roman numerals for six and four – numbers commonly used to refer to June 4.
Representatives from the European Union, Germany, Netherlands, France, Belgium and Japan visited Victoria Park at night on June 4 without answering questions from the media, the South China Morning Post reported.
A Chinese foreign ministry office in Hong Kong condemned the governments’ actions as “political manipulation” in a statement.
The Hong Kong security law, known as Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, adds to the China-drafted law that has been used to jail opposition leaders, silence street protests and pressure dozens of political groups to disband. - Bloomberg
