DW News published this video item, entitled “Hong Kong University demands removal of Tiananmen Square sculpture | DW News Asia” – below is their description.
Danish artist Jens Galschiot has hired a lawyer to secure a sculpture installed at the University of Hong Kong’s campus after HKU ordered its removal last week.
The sculpture, named Pillar of Shame, was installed at the campus in 1997, the year that Hong Kong was returned to China. The 8-meter (26-foot) piece of art mourns the people killed by Chinese troops around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
According to the university, the removal of the sculpture, which shows 50 bodies of democracy protesters, was ordered on “legal advice” as Beijing cracks down on dissent in the former British colony.
DW News YouTube Channel
Got a comment? Leave your thoughts in the comments section, below. Please note comments are moderated before publication.
In This Story: Hong Kong
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (HKSAR), is a metropolitan area and special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta of the South China Sea. With over 7.5 million residents of various nationalities in a 1,104-square-kilometre (426 sq mi) territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after the Qing Empire ceded Hong Kong Island at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898. The whole territory was transferred to China in 1997. As a special administrative region, Hong Kong maintains separate governing and economic systems from that of mainland China under the principle of “one country, two systems”.