For decades, Hong Kong’s June Fourth commemorations centred on a single demand: 平反六四 — the vindication of June Fourth. The phrase carried meanings beyond remembrance. It implied acknowledgement, rehabilitation, and the restoration of historical truth. Yet after the National Security Law, even public commemoration itself has become politically dangerous within Hong Kong. Previously, I argued that Britain’s selective nationality response after 1989 — granting full citizenship to only 50,000 families through the British Nationality Selection Scheme (BNSS) while leaving most Hongkongers with the more limited BN(O) status — shaped Hong Kong’s later political trajectory in profound ways (Wong 2026). I suggested that the unequal distribution of British citizenship contributed to divergent political incentives and anxieties within Hong Kong society during the post-handover period, culminating in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. This raises a further question: if meaningful historical reckoning can no longer occur openly in Hong Kong, what might a truth and reconciliation process connected to Hong Kong actually look like?

Rehabilitation Without Truth?

In recent years, the Hong Kong government has increasingly adopted the language of “rehabilitation” in response to the social divisions that emerged from the 2019 protests. Special rehabilitation initiatives for young people arrested but not prosecuted, alongside reintegration programmes for convicted offenders, suggest an official recognition that punishment alone cannot fully resolve the political and generational fractures exposed by the unrest.

Yet the concept of rehabilitation raises a deeper question: rehabilitation into what historical narrative? Existing programmes largely frame participants as individuals who were “misled” and who must be reintegrated through national education, mainland exchanges, and renewed identification with the Chinese nation. The underlying assumption is not that multiple interpretations of 2019 may coexist, but that social stability depends upon acceptance of a single authorised account of the crisis (Chan 2026). This differs fundamentally from the logic of truth and reconciliation processes seen elsewhere. In such processes, reconciliation is not achieved through ideological correction alone, but through testimony, acknowledgement, institutional self-examination, and the preservation of contested historical memory (Peacock 2011, 320). The annual Hong Kong demand to 平反六四 historically reflected precisely this impulse: the belief that social healing requires truth before closure.

Ironically, while open commemoration has now become politically restricted in Hong Kong, the emergence of rehabilitation discourse after 2019 may unintentionally reveal the continued absence of a genuine mechanism for historical reckoning. If the authorities themselves recognise that prosecution cannot fully repair the social rupture left by 2019, then the question becomes not merely how to rehabilitate individuals, but whether a broader process of truth recovery remains possible at all.

Selective Citizenship and Hong Kong’s Unresolved Fracture

Previous proposals for reconciliation in Hong Kong, including calls for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the 2019 protests, have largely focused on the immediate social and political divisions exposed by the unrest. Discussions often centred on tensions between the “blue” and “yellow” camps, police conduct, or the restoration of public trust (Richburg 2019). Yet such approaches risk addressing only the visible symptoms of Hong Kong’s crisis rather than its deeper historical foundations.

One overlooked dimension lies in Britain’s post-Tiananmen nationality policy. Following the Tiananmen killings, the British government created the British Nationality Selection Scheme, granting full British citizenship to a limited number of Hong Kong families while leaving the wider population with the more restricted BN(O) status, which was not inheritable. Before 2021, this status provided no pathway to full British citizenship for its holders or their descendants. In doing so, the policy fostered a perception that some Hongkongers were regarded as more worthy of British citizenship than others (Jowett, Findlay, and Li 1995, 245).

The long-term significance of this selective citizenship structure was not simply legal, but political and psychological. As I have argued elsewhere, for a small elite, full British citizenship offered a secure exit option should conditions in Hong Kong deteriorate (Wong 2025b). For the wider population, however, no comparable guarantee existed. In the decades that followed, the governing elite increasingly aligned themselves with Beijing’s political order, leading some British political figures to compare them to Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Protected by British or other foreign citizenship while administering the erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms, these governing elites came to symbolise a class that had........

© E-International