The ‘pillar of shame’ by the Danish artist Jens Galschiot had been at university for 24 years. The eight-meter-tall statue shows corpses piled up to commemorate the 1989 massacre in Beijing on Tiananmen Square, also known as Tiananmen Square. The protest against the communist government was brutally ended by the army, resulting in an estimated thousands of deaths.
The university had already decided in October that the memorial had to be pulled down. “The decision on the old statue was made on the basis of outside legal advice and a risk assessment in the interest of the university,” the statement said. China bans any public commemoration of the 1989 massacre.
Hong Kong has been a semi-autonomous region of China since 1997, but the growing influence of the Beijing regime is limiting democratic freedoms and crushing the pro-democracy movement.