Hong Kong arrests eighth person for social media posts about Tiananmen Square

The group was the first to be arrested under Hong Kong’s Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, the city’s second national security law enacted in March after Beijing passed another security law in 2020.

Police said on Monday that the eighth person arrested is a 62-year-old man suspected of committing a “crime involving seditious intent” – the same crime for which the first seven were arrested last week.

According to the new security law, this can result in a prison sentence of up to seven years.

Among those arrested last week was Chow Hang-tung, a prominent activist and leader of the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance, which once organized annual vigils to mark the crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests.

Chow has been in prison since 2021 and is already serving a sentence of more than 30 months on other charges, including “unauthorized assembly” for her attempt to publicly commemorate the June 4 anniversary.

Hong Kong’s security chief said last week that the group had published online posts designed to “stir up discontent and distrust – and even hatred – against the central government, the Hong Kong government and the judiciary.”

According to police, six of them were released on bail and a “movement restriction” was imposed.

Under Chinese rule, Hong Kong was the only place where public commemoration of Beijing’s deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 was permitted.

This three-decade-old tradition has been banned since 2020, when Beijing imposed the financial hub’s first national security law to quell opposition following huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests the previous year.

Over the weekend, a Hong Kong Christian weekly newspaper retracted its cover story on the 35th anniversary and stated in an editorial that Hong Kong society had become “more restrictive.”

A student magazine has stopped its campaign to collect people’s memories of the raids because there are “factors that we cannot resist,” according to a post on the magazine’s official social media page on Saturday.

And on Sunday, an independent bookstore posted on Instagram that several police officers were on site for an hour, taking down customers’ names after its staff wrote the number 5.35 – a coded reference to June 4 – in its window.

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