The Hoover Institution's Human Security Project and Program on US, China, and the World invites you to a discussion on Lighting Candles in Darkness: From Tiananmen to Hong Kong on Thursday, June 4, 2026 from 4:00 - 5:00 pm PT in the George P. Shultz Building, Shultz Auditorium.
On June 3-4, 1989, over 200,000 army soldiers armed with assault rifles and tanks, entered Beijing to crush a nationwide pro-democracy movement. The student-led peaceful demonstrations ended with the People’s Liberation Army firing on unarmed civilians. The death toll remains unknown even today. The Tiananmen Mothers are still not allowed to openly mourn their children; exiles cannot return home for parents’ funerals.
For three decades, Hong Kong’s Victoria Park stood as the only place on Chinese soil where commemoration was possible. Now under Beijing’s National Security Law, vigil organizers are being tried and awaiting sentencing. Join Rowena He in conversation with Larry Diamond to explore the collective efforts to keep this forbidden history alive, and what their struggle reveals about memory, truth, and resistance against authoritarian erasure.
Out of respect for attendees, photography and all forms of recording are prohibited during the reception and vigil.
About the Speakers
Rowena He is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China. A leading scholar on the 1989 Tiananmen movement and its subsequent massacre, she has testified before U.S. Congressional hearings and lectured for the U.S. State Department and Global Affairs Canada. Her commentary has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Guardian, and The Globe and Mail. A three-time recipient of Harvard University's Certificate of Teaching Excellence, she was denied a work visa to return to her position as Associate Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.'
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of political science and sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At Hoover, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Program on the US, China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center.
