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The \u00a0memorial statue reminding the Chinese people of the massacre at Tiannanmen Square has been cut up and taken down, on orders from the Chinese government.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/dec\/22\/hong-kong-memorial-to-tiananmen-victims-may-be-imminently-removed<\/a><\/p>\n From the article: Outcry as memorial to Tiananmen Square victims removed from Hong Kong University – <\/strong>First published on Wed 22 Dec 2021 12.47 EST<\/p>\n Hong Kong\u2019s oldest university and the territory\u2019s authorities have been accused of rewriting history after cutting up and removing a statue mourning those killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.<\/p>\n The erasure of the memorial from where it had stood for nearly 25 years came as Beijing has intensified its targeting of political dissent in Hong Kong since the Covid pandemic.<\/p>\n The 8-metre-tall (26ft) Pillar of Shame by the Danish sculptor Jens Galschi\u00f8t was one of the few remaining public monuments in Hong Kong commemorating the bloody crackdown that is a taboo topic in mainland China<\/a>, where it cannot be publicly marked. It had sat on the University of Hong Kong (HKU) campus since 1997, the year the city was handed back to China from Britain.<\/p>\n According to witnesses, university staff late on Wednesday erected floor-to-ceiling sheets and plastic barriers to shield the statue from view. Loud noises from power tools and chains came from the closed-off area for several hours before workmen were seen carrying out the top half of the statue and winching it on a crane towards a waiting shipping container.<\/p>\n The Pillar of Shame statue, a memorial for those killed in the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Photograph: Kin Cheung\/AP<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a symbolically important move, which fits in with so many other sad recent ones, such as campus democracy walls being stripped of posters<\/a>,\u201d said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the author of the book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, and a historian of modern China at the University of California, Irvine.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a recurring theme of disappearances; of objects from campuses and disappearances of people into prisons or exile. What is disappearing in the process \u2013 or at least diminishing dramatically, as there are still contrasts \u2013 is the sense of Hong Kong universities as radically unlike mainland ones.\u201d<\/p>\n