The connection between Hong Kong and the 1989 popular uprising in China has always been a strong and complex one, rich in meaning for both Hong Kong and mainland China. The inception of student and worker protests in the spring of 1989 in Beijing and other cities provided a much-needed chance for Hongkongers to identify with a political ideal shared with mainland “compatriots” (as Hong Kong “leftists” like to call them). For Hong Kong, eight years before its handover to Chinese sovereignty, it briefly suggested the possibility of a harmonious decolonization in which both China and Hong Kong might finally gain democratic institutions together.

Conversely, the bloody repression of the movement marked the beginning of the crisis of confidence between Hong Kong and the mainland government, which entailed an ongoing population exodus from Hong Kong throughout the 1990s and paved the way to the protest movements of 2003 (when half a million people took to the streets against National Security legislation proposed by Beijing), a turning point for the emancipation of civil society in Hong Kong. June 4 is therefore a kind of foundational day in Hong Kong, religiously commemorated by a candlelight vigil in Victoria Park every year, during which patriotic songs are sung (including several rather bloodthirsty ones such as “Xueran de Fengcai,” or “Blood-Stained Grandeur,” originally a People’s Liberation Army song to commemorate the 1979 war with Vietnam) and a form of pan-Chinese communion takes place, complete with video links to 1989 student leaders like Wang Dan (in recent years broadcasting from Taipei), and Ding Zilin (a retired professor whose son died in the crackdown and who organized and leads an informal group of other relatives of victims known as the Tiananmen Mothers). It is of course the only place on Chinese soil where such a vigil can take place, since Tiananmen remains a taboo topic in the People’s Republic of China—the government designates the protests as anti-revolutionary “turmoil” manipulated by “black hands” bent on overthrowing the government. In Hong Kong, however, support for the protesters has always been expressed in patriotic vocabulary. Hongkongers thus make an implicit claim to a different type of “patriotism”—different from the “patriotic education” increasingly incentivized in mainland schools after 1989—as a shared value in China and its Chinese-speaking periphery.

While the number of participants in the Hong Kong vigil has skyrocketed since the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Protests in 2009, including growing numbers of young students, the controversy that erupted this year around the slogan proposed by the organizers is significant of a tide change in Hong Kong, and perhaps to an extent in China. The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Democratic Patriotic Movements of China, which organizes the vigils every year, proposed as this year’s slogan “Love the country, love the people; the Hong Kong spirit.” This initiative was probably a reaction to recent debates in Hong Kong on “patriotism” : in the current debate on whether Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive is finally to be elected by universal suffrage in 2017, Beijing has made “patriotism” a vetting criterion for candidates (the idea, voiced by National People’s Congress official Qiao Xiaoyang, is ultimately derived from Deng Xiaoping’s formula ai guo ai Gang (愛國愛港), “love the country, love Hong Kong,” in which love of country comes before love of Hong Kong). The wording chosen by the Alliance was supposed to highlight once more that opposing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and commemorating the dead students, workers, and Beijing citizens of 1989 was just as, or more patriotic than, the official denial the Party still clings to.