(ANSA) – Hong Kong, December 23 – The University of Hong Kong confirmed today that a statue commemorating the dead Chinese troops in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square has been dismantled and removed after 24 years.
“The decision regarding the ancient statue was based on external legal advice and a risk assessment for the benefit of the university,” the foundation said in a statement.
Hong Kong has always been the only place in China where commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen events have been tolerated.
Each year, students from the University of Hong Kong clean up the statue installed on their campus in 1997 to honor the victims of those events. But Beijing has put its authoritarian stamp on the former British colony after large and sometimes violent protests in 2019, by imposing a national security law banning Tiananmen commemorations among other things.
In October, University of Hong Kong officials ordered the removal of the statue, which depicts a tangle of 50 painfully mutilated bodies, citing unspecified legal risks. The university confirmed that the statue was hidden from view last night before it was lifted this morning for storage. (Dealing).
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