How do you remember a massacre that’s been scrubbed from the history books? Very carefully

Hong Kong: Quietly, almost imperceptibly, they turned up to Victoria Park on Hong Kong Island, just as they had always done on the evening of June 4.

On the last occasion it was held in 2019, more than 100,000 people poured into the park for the annual candlelight vigil to remember China’s bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

This year, there were just a few and, unless you knew what to look for, you wouldn’t have noticed them.

On a park bench, an older woman sat in silence scrolling on her phone, with the device’s torchlight switched on. Not a candle, but a discrete fluorescent beam pointed at the ground.

Nearby, a father briskly pushed his toddler in a stroller with one hand, his phone in the other. The torchlight on. Also walking through the park that evening was a woman in her 20s, chatting away with a gaggle of friends, loosely holding her phone with an open palm. The torchlight on.

Around them, the park teemed with uniformed and plainclothes police.

“I used to come here every year,” said a woman, aged in her 60s, who wished only to be known as “C”.

Speaking in a hushed voice, she said she has maintained the ritual “to say goodbye to those who can’t meet us any more because of their sacrifices”.

“We are grateful for what they have done. We are not allowed to do it publicly, but we still want to remember.”

Another person, clad in all black with a cap and a face mask, also sat silently on one of the park’s benches, with his arms folded, and stared straight ahead for several hours unflinching.

Black is the colour associated with Hong Kong’s activist movement, and he had clearly aroused suspicion from authorities. A plainclothes police officer wearing an earpiece sat on the bench next to him.

Thursday marked the 37th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, when China’s army stormed into Beijing’s famous public square and turned their tanks and their guns on peaceful student protesters calling for democratic reforms.

The death toll is disputed, but eyewitness accounts have placed it between several hundred to more than 1000 dead.

China, meanwhile, has sought to scrub the incident from the country’s history books, while government censors assiduously erase any references that crop up on Chinese social media.

This year, Chinese authorities told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary, the Associated Press reported citing a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Relatives from a group called Tiananmen Mothers