She didn’t have a chance to unfurl the banner, which was almost thirty feet tall and depicted Hong Kong’s Pillar of Shame, the sculpture by Danish artist Jens Galschiøtthat that used to remind people of the Chinese government’s bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-rights protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Brian Wong reports (South China Morning Post, September 11, 2023):
A student from mainland China has admitted breaching Hong Kong’s colonial-era sedition law by planning to display a giant banner criticising police’s seizure of a sculpture remembering the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Zeng Yuxuan, also known as Annika Tsang, pleaded guilty on Monday to attempting or preparing to commit a seditious act, after she arranged for the nine-meter-tall (29-foot-tall) lithograph to be unfurled in a crowded district with the help of a former student leader of the 1989 democratic movement….
The giant banner, emblazoned with an image of the eight-metre statue, said the 1989 crackdown was a “massacre” and that “the old cannot kill the young forever”.
In December 2021, the University of Hong Kong removed Pillar of Shame from public display, explaining in a formal statement that the action was motivated by “external legal advice and risk assessment for the best interest of the university” and concern for “potential safety issues resulting from the fragile statue,” i.e., fear of the now more openly authoritarian Hong Kong government. Hong Kong police confiscated the statue in May 2023.
