Co-organized by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre and Pen Hong Kong
Date: Monday, 15 April 2019
Time: 6:30 – 8:00pm
Venue: CPD 3.28, 3/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong (Directions)
All are welcome. Please register here.
Journalists and scholars will share their findings on the anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations, about the Beijing government’s attempts to erase the Tiananmen Square crackdown from history, and how the events of that tragic day are reflected in collective memory, on social media, and in the reporting of the journalists who cover China today.
Tweets and Memories, Chinese censors are coming after me: Forbidden voices of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on Sina Weibo, 2012-2018
Dr. King-wa FuAssociate Professor, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong
Dr. King-wa Fu is an Associate Professor at the JMSC. His research focuses on the media’s influence on mental health/suicide, health communication, research method, measurement, and statistics in journalism. He has a PhD from the JMSC, a MA in Social Sciences and a MPhil in Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He obtained an undergraduate degree in engineering from The University go Hong Kong. Prior to his academic career, King-wa was a journalist at the Hong Kong Economic Journal.
Chinese authorities attempt, by all means, to suppress all forms of memories related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. The state can make the process difficult, but it can never entirely stop people from posting messages on social media, especially when the meaning behind such digital content is subtlety represented, purposely circumventing mechanical operations of keyword filters. This talk draws on the Weiboscope database at the University of Hong Kong and reviews the censored posts collected on June 3rd and June 4th of each year between 2012 and 2018. Observations will be made to examine the extent to which memory in the form of social media has been seen and erased even decades since the incident.
Memory in Movement: Collective Identity and Memory Contestation in Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Vigils
Dr. Edmund Cheng, Assistant Professor, Department of Government and International Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University
Edmund W. Cheng is an assistant professor of comparative politics at Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include contentious politics, political sociology, public opinion, Hong Kong politics and Global China. He has recently co-edited An Epoch of Social Movements: The Trajectory of New Activism in Hong Kong (Chinese University Press, 2018) and The Umbrella Movement: Civil Resistance and Contentious Space in Hong Kong(Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and published articles in China Quarterly, China Journal, Political Studies and Social Movement Studies.
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Political Science, Lingnan University
Samson Yuen is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science. He studies comparative politics, focusing on authoritarian and hybrid regimes with specialization in the Greater China region (Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan). His research interests include local governance, civil society, NGOs, contentious politics and identity politics. His works are published or forthcoming in Political Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, China Information, China Perspectives and Twenty-First Century. He also wrote for The Diplomat, Initium Media, Mingpao, The Stand News, Hong Kong Economic Journal, and Hong Kong Economic Journal Monthly. Prior to joining academia, he worked as a management consultant.He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago and an M.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, where he continued to obtain his D.Phil. in Politics.
Collective memory shapes collective identity in social movements. Yet the cultural process of transforming collective memory into collective identity and actions is anything but linear. While preserving an established narrative of the past can maintain movement solidarity, this process is actively contested by multiple actors, which may weaken solidarity and disrupt mobilization. Using onsite-surveys, interviews and content analysis, this talk examines the three-decade-long commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen protests in Hong Kong to unpack the memory process in movements. We argue that collective identity building is shaped by the interaction between the repository of memory and the repertoires that expresses them. Although the performative repertoire of the candlelight vigil has long consolidated and given moral power to the crackdown memories, such repertoire is being contested by memory challengers with competing repertoires yet without disputing the memory repositories. Our findings thus point to the performative and filtering role of repertoires in reproducing collective memory. They also reveal a dynamic and nuanced relationship between collective memory and collective identity, with specific attention placed on the mediating factors at work.
Tiananmen at Thirty: Memory as an Act of Resistance in the People’s Republic of Amnesia
Louisa LimSenior Lecturer, Audio Visual Journalism, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne
Louisa Lim is the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia; Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. She is an award-winning journalist, who grew up in Hong Kong and reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC. She is a Senior Lecturer in Audiovisual Journalism at the University of Melbourne, and is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Hong Kong. She also co-hosts the Little Red podcast, which won the News & Current Affairs category at the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.
Thirty years after the brutal crackdown, the Tiananmen anniversary has become more–rather than less–politically sensitive as time has passed. Every year, the authorities use a range of tactics to suppress both the anniversary commemorations and journalistic reporting on them. New findings indicate that three quarters of China-based correspondents have received interference from the authorities in their Tiananmen reporting, yet adherence to journalistic norms means that harassment is often unreported. In this talk, Louisa Lim examines the ways in which the legacy of Tiananmen has been excised from the collective and institutional memory in today’s China, as well as looking at the cost of memory and the role that foreign correspondents play in shaping memories of June Fourth outside China.
Moderator
Keith RichburgDirector, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong
After retiring from the Post in 2013, he became a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University and a lecturer of international reporting at Princeton University. Keith’s coverage has won numerous awards, including two George Polk Awards, and was twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reports from Somalia. His 1997 book, Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, chronicles his travels across Africa. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.Keith Richburg is a journalist and former China correspondent who spent more than thirty years overseas for The Washington Post, serving as bureau chief in Paris, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Nairobi, and Manila. He covered the invasion in Iraq, the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the US military intervention in Somalia, the genocide in Rwanda, and the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China. He was also The Post’s Foreign Editor from 2005-2007 and helped cover the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
