Zhou Fengsuo, executive director of Human Rights in China and a student leader who was present at Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3 to 4, 1989, delivered the following address at a 37th-anniversary memorial concert held in Toronto’s North York Civic Centre Square on May 30, 2026.
Being here in Toronto today, I feel a deep sense of belonging, as though I am among friends. In a moment of such grief, this is one of the rare places where comfort is possible and hope is visible, because we are gathered here in numbers, together, to stand with Chow Hang-tung, who remains behind bars; to stand with the Tiananmen Mothers; and to stand with every life lost in that year.
I want to thank the Toronto Association for Democracy in China, and the democratic organizations in this city that have held the line for so many years. Toronto is one of the most important cities in the world for June 4 commemorations. We must remember that events like this one, like the vigils once held at Victoria Park in Hong Kong, are watched by the entire world.
Thirty-seven years ago, I was in Tiananmen Square. Late on the night of June 3, I heard gunfire coming from every direction and watched tanks come rolling in. I was among the last students to be driven out, pushed away by the tanks themselves.
‘More than forty bodies’
I also stood in a hospital and saw more than forty bodies, including fellow students from Tsinghua University. Fuxing Hospital, on the western stretch of Chang’an Avenue, was overwhelmed with the dead and wounded. Some of the victims, those brave souls, could only be laid out in the bicycle sheds along the street.
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Those moments, those days, I will never forget. I carry a debt to everyone who was lost. That is why, every year, whenever there is an opportunity to commemorate June 4, I am there.
We gather today because too many of the dead have still not received justice. We gather because so many people are still holding on: holding on around the world, holding on inside mainland China, holding on from prison cells in Hong Kong.
I must speak today about Xu Guang, a student activist from the class of 1989 who was sentenced to four years in prison simply for commemorating June 4. He served every day of that sentence, maintaining a hunger strike throughout his imprisonment, and when he was released in May 2026, he was too weak to stand. Even so, the words he sent out were: “For democracy and freedom, we have no regrets.” That is what June 4 means. For all of us who were there, the most important mission is to push China toward democracy.
Here in Toronto, on June 4, I must also speak about Dong Guangping. He was a serving police officer, from a family of Communist Party officials, a man formed entirely inside the system. When he faced a choice between justice and complicity, he chose justice. He has spoken out for the dead again and again, spoken out for the truth about June 4, and has been imprisoned four times for it. He refused to break, kept pursuing his freedom, and at various points fled to Thailand and Vietnam, only to be arrested and forcibly returned to the mainland. Just days ago, he crossed to South Korea on a raft he built himself, after more than thirty hours at sea. His family has already been granted asylum in Canada, and we are grateful for that. We hope that someone like Dong Guangping will be reunited with his family soon. I hope that next year, he will be able to stand among us, free, to mark June 4 without fear of being taken away by the Party.
‘The communist party wants us to forget’
We also commemorate June 4 for a simple reason: the Communist Party wants us to forget. They have deployed every means available to erase it from memory. And yet, every year, more of the truth surfaces: more eyewitness accounts, more photographs, more documents.
The most significant piece of evidence to emerge in the past year is six hours of footage from the military tribunal of General Xu Qinxian, the senior CCP commander who refused orders to deploy troops against the protesters. Anyone who has not yet watched it should do so. Its significance is profound.
Today, the CCP’s military remains a threat to world peace, above all to Taiwan. At this critical moment, we also call on soldiers of conscience within that military to refuse to become instruments of repression, to refuse such orders.
And today, as we mark June 4, we owe our deepest gratitude to the people of Hong Kong. It was because of Hong Kong’s thirty-plus years of candlelight vigils at Victoria Park, a vast annual gathering in a public park that became the largest June 4 memorial in the world, that the world still remembers what happened. When the CCP imposed a national security law on Hong Kong in 2020 and systematically dismantled civil society, those vigils were banned. The people who organized them were imprisoned.
Our deepest gratitude belongs to the brave leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, and above all to Chow Hang-tung, a Hong Kong barrister and activist who was a small girl when June 4 happened and who has become, today, the most vital embodiment of the spirit of 1989. Those of us who were there that night salute her.
Hong Kong is governed more harshly
Hong Kong today, under the CCP’s national security regime, is governed more harshly than much of the mainland itself. Chow Hang-tung is imprisoned, and the end of her sentence is not in sight. Yet whenever she has the chance, she speaks. When Victoria Park was shuttered and the vigils were banned, she turned the courtroom into Victoria Park, using her trial to speak the truth, to speak for the Tiananmen Mothers, to speak for history.
With people like her, I know that what those who died in 1989 were reaching for is still alive. With people like her, how could any of us in exile justify stopping?
Her example makes one thing clear: however the CCP’s tyranny imprisons the body, it cannot imprison conscience.
June 4 belongs not only to the past. It belongs to today: to every political prisoner, to every journalist who refuses to be silenced, to every person who tells the truth. As long as we keep going, keep commemorating, the dream of a free and democratic China will endure.
Our work will one day help move China toward democracy. A democratic China would be the greatest gift this world could receive. Thank you.
