We pointed out in Chapter 1 that collective remembering of the Tiananmen crackdown in Hong Kong is a case of a socially dominant collective memory that is critical toward the political power holders. The formation and persistence of the collective memory cannot be understood in terms of a straightforward presentist perspective that emphasizes the capability of those in power to manipulate the society's understandings of the past to serve their present interests. Rather, the case can illustrate why and how a collective memory closely associated with the forces of political resistance can arise and persist.

Hong Kong itself boosts certain conditions that allowed the formation of collective memory of Tiananmen in the first place. To point out the most obvious one: Hong Kong had for a long period of time the freedom to publicly remember events that the state might prefer the society to forget. The 1989 student movement occurred in the middle of the “transition period” for Hong Kong, i.e., the period between the signing of the Sino-British declaration in 1984 and the eventual handover of sovereignty in 1997. In the last 15 years of the colonial era, the British government promoted democratization in the city in order to savor its legitimacy and plan for a “glorious retreat.” A political society came into being (Kuan, 1998). The society enjoyed high degrees of civil liberties, and values such as democracy and freedom acquired a dominant status in public discourses (Sum, 1995). The news media were professionalized, and journalists began to take up the liberal conception of the press as their normative self-understanding (So & Chan, 2007).