The June Fourth Memorial Museum in El Monte, California was broken into and vandalized over the weekend, museum co-founder Wang Dan (王丹) said earlier this week.
The incident, which was first reported by the Hong Kong Free Press, took place less than a week shy of the 37th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, which the museum commemorates. Wang was among the most influential student leaders in the pro-democracy student movement that prompted the crackdown.
“The main part of the museum’s exhibition, including parts of the walls, was defaced with spray paint, causing serious damage to the museum’s assets,” the museum said in a statement.
“My first reaction was shock, followed by anger,” Wang told Domino Theory in an email. “Finally, I’m prepared to accept this challenge and continue to run the memorial hall well.”
Wang said Monday he believed the incident was a case of transnational repression, which refers to the Chinese Communist Party’s decades-long effort to silence and intimidate members of its global diaspora who are critical of the regime.
Andrew Mora of the El Monte Police Department told Domino Theory in an email that the department had opened an investigation, which is ongoing. “The crime is also being investigated as a hate crime and will be reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in compliance with applicable hate crime reporting requirements,” Mora said.
The June Fourth Memorial Museum was established in El Monte a year ago after relocating from New York. Its exhibits include a list of names of those who were killed in the massacre, as well as a letter sent to Wang by Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), a Chinese scholar who received the Nobel Peace Prize for human rights advocacy in 2010.
The museum had not been targeted prior to this past weekend’s incident, Wang told Domino Theory. “I was worried, but there haven’t been any transnational repressions in the past three years, so I didn’t expect it,” he said.
The museum has said that its anniversary activities this year will go on as planned. On Thursday at 3 p.m., the museum will unveil a new mural on the outside of the building, in a ceremony that will be attended by Zhang Boli (張伯笠), also a student leader from 1989.
Wang also plans to preserve some of the vandalized materials to be displayed in a future exhibition.
“Because transnational repression is also part of human rights violations, the vandalism of the June 4th Memorial Hall, in my view, is itself a continuation of the June 4th repression, and therefore should be part of the exhibition,” he said. “It should allow people to see how historical memory is destroyed.”
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