April 15, 2016
A man walking past a display at a museum in Hong Kong dedicated to remembering the June 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.
Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
HONG KONG — After two years on the fifth floor of a Hong Kong office building, the only museum dedicated to the 1989 Tiananmen protest movement is expected to close this year. The organizers of the June 4th Museum say they are scrambling to find a new location.
The 800-square-foot museum in the packed Tsim Sha Tsui shopping and tourism district includes photographs, descriptions of some of the protesters killed in the military crackdown and a replica of the Goddess of Democracy, a statue erected by students during their occupation of Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The museum has been opposed by the building’s owners corporation, and the organizers faced a lawsuit that they have decided they do not want to continue spending money to fight, said Albert Ho, chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which established the museum.
Mr. Ho said he believed politics was behind the lawsuit over the museum. “It’s not the owners’ corporation that’s paying to sue us. It’s just one person,” he said in an interview on Thursday. He was referring to Stanly Chau Kwok-chiu, the chairman of the corporation, who owns a clothing factory in mainland China.
Mr. Chau could not be reached for comment. In interviews with the local news media, he has denied a political motive in suing the museum.
Mr. Ho said that the museum would close in August or September.
“We’re raising funds and hoping to relocate to a bigger, ground-floor location, or in a shopping mall,” he said.
In addition to the lawsuit, Mr. Ho said the building’s management had been harassing visitors with administrative tactics.
“They check visitors’ I.D. and scare away many mainland visitors,” he said.
The protesters in Beijing and other Chinese cities demanded an end to corruption and a greater say in government. The crackdown on June 3-4, 1989, left hundreds dead, and it is a largely taboo subject in mainland China, with discussion censored online and in other media. Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese control in 1997 but maintains its own legal system and semiautonomous government, is the only place in the People’s Republic of China where the protests are openly commemorated.
In 2014, on the 25th anniversary of the crackdown, the museum experienced a surge in visitors, including many mainlanders. From its opening in April 2014 to January this year, the museum received more than 20,000 visitors, one-third of whom came from mainland China, according to a statement on the website of the Hong Kong Alliance. The group was founded in May 1989 to support the protests in Beijing and has continued to support mainland democracy advocates.
