June 4 Splits Students, Poly U Plans Street Stall

Students at most of the universities in Hong Kong have vowed to stay away from the annual June 4 vigil, while the Polytechnic University union said it will be organising street booths with documents from 1989 that were discovered recently.

The union president Lam Wing-hang said the documents and photos were left by students of the university at the time.

Several university student unions say they will not attend the annual June 4 vigil this year to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

Lam said they are not participating in the vigil because they disagree with the event's focus on the mainland.

But Lam told RTHK's Janice Wong that they believe it's important for people to know the facts of the Tiananmen crackdown, and that is why they are setting up their street booths.

But the student union of Chinese University said that it is not planning any event to commemorate June 4.

Speaking on a radio programme on Wednesday, the student union's president, Au Cheuk-hei, explained that they have not been able to find a new way to study the massacre and so they decided to hold off on doing anything to commemorate the events.

He added that the union decided to shun the annual Victoria Park vigil organised by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China because it was more of a formality. But he also stressed that history should not be forgotten.

Appearing on the same programme, HKU's student union president, Davin Wong, said they will only carry on with tradition of polishing the Pillar of Shame on the university's campus and repainting slogans on Swire Bridge. He said it should be up to Hong Kong people to decide whether to keep commemorating the massacre.

Five other student organisations have also indicated that they will not join the June 4 vigil, including City University and Lingnan University.