Hong Kong condemns the memory of Tiananmen: seven years in prison for three vigil organisers

On 11 September 2026, a Hong Kong national-security court sentenced three former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance to prison terms of five to seven years. Their crime: organising, every 4 June, the candlelight vigil that gathered at Victoria Park in memory of the victims of the crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Lawyer Chow Hang-tung, forty-one, received seven years and three months; the trade unionist Lee Cheuk-yan, sixty-nine, seven years; the former legislator Albert Ho, seventy-four, who pleaded guilty, five years and two months. The judges found them guilty of "inciting subversion" for having called to "end one-party dictatorship"; the association, which dissolved itself in September 2021, was further fined 1.5 million Hong Kong dollars.

The magistrates nonetheless acknowledged that the case "involved neither violence nor the threat of violence" and that the accused had advanced "no concrete means and no timetable"; they judged the offence "serious in nature" all the same, punishable by ten years under the national-security law that came into force in 2020. Chow and Lee have been detained for nearly five years, Ho for about three and a half. Tolerated for decades as the last public commemoration of Tiananmen on Chinese soil, the vigil was banned in 2020 under cover of health restrictions, and again in 2021. The number of those killed on 4 June 1989 has never been established: estimates range from several hundred to several thousand.

The memory of the dead and the limits of power

To pray for the dead and to keep their memory is not a political opinion: it is a duty that Scripture calls holy. "It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins" (2 Machabees, XII, 46). The Catechism of the Council of Trent numbers the care owed to the departed among the works of mercy, and teaches that the living must succour the dead by prayer. He who lights a candle for thousands of the slain disturbs no order: he performs an act of piety that every just law has the duty to protect.

Civil authority comes from God, but it is not without limits. Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches that a law contrary to the good and to justice does not bind the conscience and is no longer a law, but an act of violence (Summa Theologica, I-II, question 96, article 4). A power that punishes not evil but mourning, that calls the memory of victims "subversion," steps outside its charge and turns the sword against the innocent. The prophet had said it: "Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil" (Isaias, V, 20).

The régime sitting in judgment here is that of the single Communist party. Now the Church, before the Council, passed on it a sentence without appeal. Pius XI declared that "Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever" (encyclical Divini Redemptoris, 1937). A system that forbids the mourning of its dead confirms, better than any argument, what the Church had discerned of its nature.

The measure

Held against this rule, the sentence judges itself. It does not punish a crime: it punishes a remembrance. The judges concede the absence of all violence and all plan, then strike men of forty-one, sixty-nine and seventy-four with five to seven years in prison, for words and candles. Chow Hang-tung has said she does not deserve "a single day" behind bars, and natural justice proves her right: where there is neither violence nor harm, there is no matter for punishment, but for liberty. To forbid the memory of the dead is to confess that one fears the truth it carries.

For the faithful, the lesson is twofold. First, what is sacred in prayer for the departed depends on no permission of the State: where the vigils are forbidden, the duty remains, and the Church has always discharged it, in the catacombs if need be. Second, a power that criminalises mourning unmasks itself: it does not fight sedition, it fights memory, because the memory of injustices is already a judgment. We call neither to revolt nor to despair, but to hold the faith as the Church has always taught it, and to pray for the dead whom others would efface.

Sources. 2 Machabees, XII, 46 (Vulgate); Isaias, V, 20; Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the works of mercy and prayer for the departed; Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 96, a. 4; Pius XI, encyclical Divini Redemptoris (1937).