Political Mourning as Ritual Protest: The Chinese Religious Elements of the June 4 Candlelight Vigils in Hong Kong

The year 1989 was a sorrowful year for the Chinese and Hong Kong people. From April 15 to June 4, 1989, a massive student-led and pro-democracy movement occurred in different cities in China. The protest in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, was the largest, and the movement ended with a massacre. Armed troops equipped with automatic rifles and tanks were sent to suppress the protesters who had gathered in Tiananmen Square. Following orders from the highest authority, troops opened fire on citizens without hesitation. The image of the “Tank Man,” a man standing in front of a column of tanks, captured the asymmetrical power relationship between citizens and troops.

Initially, the Chinese government stated that only about three hundred people, mostly soldiers, died. However, numerous local eyewitnesses, journalists, and scholars contradicted this claim. Based on various reports, it is widely believed that several hundred, possibly even over two thousand, protesters and Beijing residents were killed, with many more injured or arrested.  In accordance with political philosopher Judith Butler’s conceptualization in Frames of War (2009), those who died are ungrievable because the public framing of this movement, as controlled by the Chinese government, does not recognize the loss of those lives. The Chinese government condemned the movement as a “riot” and “counter-revolutionary” act, framing the movement as a threat to national stability. According to the government, sending troops was necessary to restore order and prevent chaos. This perspective was dominantly propagated through state media and remains the official position of the Chinese government today.

While public mourning was strictly prohibited in Beijing, Hong Kong—still a British colony at that time, enjoying freedom of speech, assembly, and press—offered a different context. Taking advantage of this freedom, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (hereafter referred to as the Alliance) was formed to organize annual candlelight vigils on June 4th to mourn the crackdown victims. This act of remembrance and mourning eventually became a thirty-year tradition, with the last vigil occurring in 2019. After the 2019 protests, in 2020, the Hong Kong government used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to ban the vigil permanently. With the new implementation of the National Security Law, the Alliance was disbanded in 2021, and its leaders are currently imprisoned or exiled outside Hong Kong. 

As a third-generation citizen of Hong Kong born in 1989 and raised there, I participated in the annual June 4 candlelight vigils. This experience fuels my sense of urgency to document this practice and investigate the social function of rites of mourning, especially in the context of where the Hong Kong government has strived to erase the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. 

In conversation with the scholarly literature on mourning (e.g. Emile Durkheim, Heather Pool) and ritual (e.g. Vector Turner, Catherine Bell), this paper aims to incorporate a case study of Hong Kong to illustrate how political mourning can be a ritual protest that articulates a counter-narrative to the dominant political propaganda about the lives lost to persecution under authoritarian regimes. This paper aims to focus on the religious presence in the candlelight vigils and address the following questions: When did Hong Kong people start mourning the victims of the June 4 Massacre? How did these rites of mourning become institutionalized as an annual tradition? What kind of religious mourning rites were employed in the candlelight vigils? What are the social functions of candlelight vigils when they are described as ritual protests? 

To investigate the practice of the candlelight vigils, the primary sources I will use are the video recordings of the events and their program books. The Alliance recorded each year’s candlelight vigil from 1990-2019 and uploaded them to YouTube. I was able to download their videos and program books before the government shut down their YouTube channel and website. In addition to these primary sources, I will also rely on newspaper reports, documentaries, and scholarly works on candlelight vigils. These investigations build a path for my following discussion.

To investigate those sources with an analytical frame, I will illustrate the intersections between political mourning and ritual protest. By engaging with the work of David I. Kertzer’s Ritual, Politics & Power (1988), Heather Pool’s Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy (2021), Molly Farneth’s The Politics of Ritual (2023), and other scholarly works, this paper will clarify under what conditions political mourning can constitute a form of ritual protest and what six characteristics a ritual protest should possess to structure effective political mourning in public. 

After establishing this analytical framework, I will examine the origins of candlelight vigils in Hong Kong. As religious scholars have identified, Christianity, Buddhism, and popular Chinese religions, have been diffused in civil society and have significantly impacted Hong Kong society beyond their institutional levels. This paper will investigate how Hong Kong people creatively adopted and utilized funeral rites from various religious traditions to collectively mourn the crackdown victims. This paper will analyze how funeral rites, such as public shrines, funeral processions, and memorial services in the first 100 days, laid the foundation for the formation of the annual candlelight vigils. 

Building on ethnographers Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, the third part of this paper will analyze the annual June 4 candlelight vigils organized by the Alliance with a threefold structure of rites of passage, namely, rites of separation, rites of transition, and rites of incorporation. By categorizing the rites in the vigils, such as offering flowers, lighting the torch and candles, reading eulogies, singing songs, and burning books of condolences, among others, in these three different stages, this paper will highlight the vigils' liminal nature, explain the symbolic meaning of those rites, and illustrate their sociopolitical functions. This paper will demonstrate how political mourning/ritual protest, as a collective expression of grassroots power, can channel collective grief to address social injustice and advocate for social transformation.