People light candles at a vigil in Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4, 2020, after the annual remembrance for the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown was banned on public health grounds during the pandemic.YAN ZHAO/AFP/Getty Images

Rowena He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China.

“In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands have gathered in Victoria Park each June 4 to hold a candlelight vigil to remember those young lives that were violently cut short…The image of the endless sea of candles has become as iconic as the Tank Man, reminding us that Tiananmen is not just about repression, but also about hope.”

When I wrote those words in 2019, before the annual vigil marking the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that would be the last time the event would take place. I didn’t know that the organization that held the public remembrance, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (HK Alliance), would be forced to disband two years later amid allegations that it was an “agent of foreign forces,” leading to the arrest of its members under the National Security Law imposed by Beijing in Hong Kong in 2020.........

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