HONG KONG -- The future of Hong Kong's most prominent standing memorial to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre is in limbo after a breakdown in talks over its removal between the Danish sculptor who created it and the university which has inadvertently hosted it for 24 years.
Amid a wider drive to suppress Hong Kong commemorations of the Beijing killings under the rubric of a new emphasis on patriotism toward China's Communist regime, lawyers representing the University of Hong Kong wrote to a local group dedicated to preserving memories of the incident last month, demanding that it remove the 8-meter tall "Pillar of Shame" statue within five days.