Hong Kong’s June 4 Memorial Museum, which commemorates the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, was vandalized days before its scheduled re-opening.

On April 7 at around 10 a.m. workers entered the museum, which is located in Hong Kong’s busy district of Mong Kok, and found that the lock was missing, chairs, cardboards, power sockets, main switches and other items had been damaged. The museum is currently being set up for its re-opening on April 26.


June 4th Museum (5/F, Foo Hoo Centre, 3 Austin Avenue, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon) (Image by Dltl2012 via Wikimedia Commons)

Because security cameras had not been installed yet, the perpetrators could not be identified.

The June 4 Memorial Museum was first launched in 2014 by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (香港市民支援愛國民主運動聯合會), which also organizes the yearly Tiananmen Square Vigil in Victoria Park. It was the first museum in the world dedicated to the 1989 crackdown.

The museum, which was located on the 5th floor of a building in Tsim Sha Tsui, soon became a popular attraction with tourists from mainland China, where the Tiananmen Square crackdown is a taboo topic, heavily censored by the Chinese Communist regime.

However, in 2016 the museum was compelled to close after a protracted legal dispute with tenants, who argued that the museum broke regulations regarding commercial use. Albert Ho, chairman of the Alliance, believed that the tenants’ legal action was “politically motivated.”

In December 2018 the Alliance announced its decision to purchase a 1,100 square feet space in a commercial building in Mong Kong to re-open the museum in time for the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The Hong Kong police are treating the recent act of vandalism as burglarly, but the organizers believe that the incident is related to the politically sensitive topic of the exhibition.

Richard Tsoi Yiu-cheong, the vice-chairman of the Alliance, stated that the organizers will not be frightened and the museum will open on April 26 as planned.

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