150,000 CANDLES PART 2: A RUSH AND A PUSH AND THE PARK IS OURS

[defrog]

So, as I was saying, we went to this little candlelight vigil last night. I took some pictures. Here’s half of them.



Yes, they’re crap, but all I had was a Nokia N95 with a Nightshot function. And even some of the blurry ones aren’t that bad. Just pretend I’m being stylish and arty.

[Notice the students liveblogging there in the upper right hand corner. I like that one.]

As for the vigil, I should state right off, in the interest of full disclosure, that the bridal unit and I didn’t actually attend the vigil proper – in the sense that we couldn’t even get in.

We ran a bit late, you see. And by the time we got there, Victoria Park was absolutely jam-packed. The crowd was spilling out onto the sidewalk areas outside the fence. People climbed onto railings, substations and nearby skywalks to get a glimpse.

So we haunted the edges of the vigil, where there was plenty of activity – people sitting in the pavilion outside the park, booths raising funds for various political causes (I bought a badge from the Tiananmen Mothers), and people with bullhorns making their own speeches to the passers-by.

We didn’t really get a sense of how many people were there until we moved along the sidewalk on the north side of the soccer pitches where the main activities were going on. The walkway itself was pretty full. Then I looked over to the main part of the park – and saw hundreds and hundreds more candles burning in the dark.

I can’t overstress how powerful that was. Every other vigil I’ve been to, you could fit everyone inside the soccer-pitch area, and there was usually a little room at the back. This year, the entire park was full. The organizers counted 150,000 people. The police, typically, counted 62,000. Usually I split the difference, but we’ll go with 150,000, because damn that’s a nice number.

Granted, some of that can be chalked up to the round number of 20 years. But I’d like to think there was more to it than that. Some of it was almost certainly the result of The Donald trying to gloss over June 4 AND claiming to speak for everyone in the city, as well as a few local politicians trying to use China’s economic progress as an excuse to stop worrying about what did or didn’t happen on June 4, 1989.



[Pic via BBC News]

It probably didn’t help when Ayo Chan, leader of the Hong Kong University Student Union, said in April that the student union wouldn’t participate this year because what happened at Tiananmen had little to do with Hong Kong today and anyway, the violence would never have happened if the students had just given up and got back to class. The students he represented promptly ousted him.

So ... will any of this make a difference? Not in Beijing, no. It took the CCCP 30 years just to admit that the Cultural Revolution probably wasn’t one of their better ideas. And I don’t think they’ll ever revisit the Tiananmen incident until they can at the very least figure out a way to do it without implying that the students were right about anything.

But that’s no reason for the rest of us to stop talking about it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Never forget,

This is dF

Comments

[ziyda.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post.

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

My pleasure. :)

[thelastaerie.livejournal.com]

150,000 is very good turnout. Thanks for the pics!