"THE OLD CANNOT KILL THE YOUNG FOREVER"

This is what I have found out today on the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen Sqaure protests of 1989. There is actually a "Pillar of Shame" (國殤之柱) erected at the podium of Haking Wong building at the University of Hong Kong. And on the base of the sculpture, history of the massacre are engraved in both Chinese and English. "The Tiananmen Massacre, June 4th 1989"(六四屠殺) and "The old cannot kill the young forever"(老人豈能夠殺光年輕人). For those of you who read Chinese as I do, the meaning in Chinese impacts the heartstrings deeply.

Apparently, there are 4 other "Pillar of Shame" erected in Rome, Mexico, Brazil and Berlin. These sculptures are erected to remind people of the shameful events which should never recur. What is interesting to me is the date when the pillar was first erected in Hong Kong. It was 1997, the year of Hong Kong's return to China. How had the Chinese government felt about it then?

19 years on, students at the University of Hong Kong are still having some events like painting slogans on the pavements to commemorate the massacre but I wonder how many of them are really just going through the motion. Honestly, I do not have much memory about the massacre except that I remember seeing on TV news that tanks were driven onto Tiananmen Square where the protesting students were and many students were executed. I was terrified with what I saw but I still cannot fully understand what was the cause of the protests. So many lives have been killed, so much criticisms have been made of the Chinese government but have anything changed? Did the Chinese governement officially announce regrets about the event? Many mainland Chinese friends I know have absolutely no idea of the Tiananmen Massacre because they have been brainwashed and the event has been literally erased from their history textbooks. Like the Japanese history textbooks, the history of World War II also distorted in favour of the Japanese. So who's the pot here calling the kettle black?