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The Shadow of Tiananmen Falls on Hong Kong


The anniversary of the massacre coincides with verdicts in the trial of the pro-democracy activists known as the Hong Kong 47.

On June 4, 1989, the Communist Party turned its tanks and soldiers on the protesters, killing, in the least, hundreds of people (a precise number remains unknown) and deflecting the democratic wave that toppled the Soviet Union and its allies in the Eastern Bloc. In the past decade, the cycles of unrest and tightening control have damaged Hong Kong’s reputation as a hub for business in Asia, and, in recent months, local authorities have strained to lure back foreign investors. So, if you’re an international business, you could say, ‘Well, this doesn’t apply to me—the National Security Law is mostly used to crack down on human-rights activists and opposition politicians.’ All true, but when you look at the history of how this stuff plays out on the mainland, you see political control of the judiciary start to bleed into other spaces.

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