May 35th

I know there is no such date on your calendar, but it is on mine. In fact, such date exists on the calendar for any Chinese who remembers what happened in 1989.

How could I explain why a government would kill thousands of unarmed students? How could I explain why a government would destroy thousands of families when they only asked for a less corrupted government? How could I explain why the death of thousands of souls cannot appear in the history textbook in China? I wish I knew the answer, but I don’t.

It started with the death of the premier Zhou in April 1989. Students then started mourning about his death in Tiananmen Square, an important landmark in Beijing. Students, particularly those studied in universities, started to comment on the government. The most general comment was the level of corruption. As the criticism began to gain momentum, the state newspapers, People’s Daily, identified such criticism as a sign of revolt. This column did not go down well with the students, and they began to camp in the area and initiated a hunger strike. Just in case you did not know, Tiananmen Square is at the centre of Beijing, which is a political landmark and tourist area.

By May 1989, the movement in Tiananmen Square started attracting international attention. Back then, I was in grade 6 and I saw a huge number of Hong Kong people protested for the first time in my life. To be precise, over one million people protested (the population was only six million in the city). Given the development of situation, we knew something bad was going to happen.

On June 4, I cried for the first time while I was watching a TV news program. At such a young age, it was beyond my comprehension that anyone would kill civilians when the whole world was watching. It was 1989, not 1914. I thought I would never see that kind of killing in my lifetime, and I thought WWII was the end of genocide in human history, but I was wrong. I could not be more wrong.

When you live in a country ruled by dictators, press freedom is nonexistence. In short, June 4 does not exist when you search on Baidu (the equivalent of Google in China). To overcome this kind of barrier, someone came up the idea of May 35. Hence, May 35 was searchable on the internet in China last year, but I do not know how long we can get away with it. After all, there are more than one million internet polices in China – you cannot hide for very long when so many Big Brothers are watching.

 

 

The fifth estate

Having spent six years in the UK, I have a lot of feelings for the country. I love its culture, its diversity, the parks, the London accent and many other things. However, one thing does stand out: its freedom of the press. For an average Canadian you may think I am being silly, but I come from a city where reporters can be arrested for asking questions in a media conference. So, freedom of the press is not exactly a God-given right in some parts of the world.

Anyway, the first time I heard about the 30-year rule I was fascinated. Back in my days as a student, it was an annual event. Each year, all public records would be made available for public inspection once they had been in existence for thirty years. Then the rules were changed with effect from 2005. The essence of the change is that any citizen can request a wide range of information even before the 30-year point, though exceptions would apply to certain types of record.

A recent example is the disclosure of a document about the Falklands war, which took place in 1982. For years, most people had the perception that Margaret Thatcher had a very strong opinion about the war and wanted to win at all cost. However, the document released in 2012 shows a different picture.

The spirit here is not what Margaret Thatcher thought, but being a citizen means you have the rights to question what really happens in your government. The 30-year rule, or whatever it is called in other democratic countries, is there to protect sensitive information and to make sure it cannot be destroyed without a very valid reason. But like I said earlier, not every country has the same level of freedom and same level of respect for public information. In 2012, I found out a huge amount of public records were destroyed in Hong Kong – if you stack them up, it would be about 14 times the height of the Manitoba Hydro building in downtown Winnipeg.

There is no legislation in place to protect the public record in Hong Kong, so there is no legal implication when someone destroys any public record. Essentially they can burn every single public record even as I type this blog (the person may be tried for arson, but not for destroying public records).

The fourth estate hardly functions in Hong Kong already, and the citizens – I call them the fifth estate, have no way to find out what actually happens because any public record can be destroyed anytime. I cannot help myself but to draw parallelism between Hong Kong in 2012 and Berlin in the 1930s.

God bless Hong Kong.