Special to WorldTribune.com

Tens of thousands of people in Hong Kong attended events across the city Saturday to mark the 27th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. …

Leading student groups boycotted the decades-old candlelit vigil held in Victoria Park, over complaints the event has become “rigid” and too focused on Chinese issues, rather than advancing democracy in Hong Kong. One group even denounced the vigil organizers — members of the Hong Kong Alliance — as “pimps in a brothel.”

The Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) — the city’s oldest and largest student organization — withdrew from the Alliance in the lead up to this year’s event, sparking fears that attendance would be far lower than in previous years. Those fears proved to be unfounded, with the Alliance saying 125,000 people had poured into Victoria Park. Thousands more attended forums and ceremonies around the city organized by so-called “localist” groups, which advocate more autonomy or even independence for Hong Kong. …

Speaking at the event, Ray Wong, the leader of localist group Hong Kong Indigenous, said that mourning the Tiananmen massacre was no longer relevant to Hong Kong, and that it symbolized a misguided fantasy of reforming China. Instead, he said, Hong Kongers should focus on “building power” so that China’s Communist Party would one day have no choice but to grant independence to the former British colony.

One attendee, who described herself as “not Chinese, but a Hong Konger,” said she was sad that the students had turned against Hong Kong’s older democracy activists. “The Communist Party is our common enemy, and we need to be united against them,” she said.

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  Hong Kong, LIFE, Tens of thousands in Hong Kong remember Tiananmen: ‘The Communist Party is our common enemy’, Tiananmen, WorldTribune.com