The Pillar of Shame and the erasure of Hong Kong
In the dead of night one of the most prominent memorials to the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Pillar of Shame, was removed from Hong Kong University this week. The eight-metre high statue – commemorating the thousands killed in Beijing’s brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in June 1989 – was filmed being loaded into a container late on Wednesday night. It is not the only piece of public art to have been targeted. At dawn on Christmas Eve a bronze ‘Goddess of Democracy’ – a replica of a statue built by students on Tiananmen square – was dismantled by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. And at Lingnan University a wall
