Group behind Hong Kong's Tiananmen vigil denies foreign ties

HONG KONG – The radical down the yearly Tiananmen Square memorial vigil successful Hong Kong said Sunday it volition not cooperate with constabulary conducting a nationalist information probe into the group's activities, calling it an maltreatment of power.

Police notified the Hong Kong Alliance successful Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China past period it was nether probe for moving for overseas interests, an accusation it denied.

“This is simply a truly atrocious precedent of the nationalist information (police) abusing the powerfulness by arbitrarily labeling immoderate civilian enactment arsenic a overseas agent,” Chow Han Tung, vice chairwoman of the alliance, said astatine a quality league called to code the constabulary investigation.

“The confederation powerfully denies that we are immoderate overseas agents," Chow said. "We are an enactment that was founded during the 1989 antiauthoritarian movement, it was founded by the Hong Kong people.”

The probe is portion of a wide crackdown connected Hong Kong civilian nine pursuing wide pro-democracy protests successful 2019. Authorities person tightened power implicit the metropolis with a sweeping nationalist information instrumentality imposed by China's ruling Communist Party that efficaciously criminalized absorption to the government. The instrumentality and different changes person forced respective civilian organizations to disband oregon seen their leaders arrested.

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The yearly candlelight vigil honors the students who died erstwhile China’s subject violently suppressed monolithic pro-democracy protests successful Beijing's Tiananmen Square connected June 4, 1989.

Hong Kong had been the lone spot successful China allowed to clasp specified a commemoration, and successful past years, tens of thousands of radical gathered successful Victoria Park to grant the dead. Smaller crowds gathered this twelvemonth and successful 2020 contempt constabulary banning the vigil, citing coronavirus restrictions connected nationalist gatherings.

Police had asked the confederation to manus implicit immoderate accusation astir groups they had worked with overseas oregon successful Taiwan, arsenic good arsenic interaction information. They did not notation what circumstantial incidents prompted the investigation.

Chow said the confederation has not been capable to scope a statement connected whether to disband. It plans to clasp a wide gathering connected Sept. 25 to sermon the substance again.

In August, the salient Hong Kong Civil Human Rights Front, made up of a slew of subordinate organizations, said it could nary longer run and chose to disband. The radical organized ample protests successful 2019.

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More than 100 pro-democracy activists person been arrested nether Hong Kong's nationalist information law, which outlaws subversion, secession, coercion and overseas collusion to interfere successful the city’s affairs. Many different activists person gone into exile abroad.

Critics accidental the instrumentality restricts freedoms Hong Kong was promised it could support for 50 years pursuing the territory's 1997 handover to China from assemblage Britain.

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Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan.

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