This keynote is grounded in two decades of fieldwork on the preservation of historical memory tabooed by the CCP regime. It traces the trajectory of an intergenerational battle against state-imposed amnesia, starting from the 1989 Tiananmen Movement and its subsequent Massacre and continuing into Hong Kong’s 2019 student-led civic resistance. Through lived experience, it illustrates how the simple act of remembering can become the cause of fear and punishment, and the implications of such price of dissent on academic freedom and free expression in an era of rising authoritarianism. Yet, this address reveals how bearing witness to the forbidden memory can become a moral act of defiance – the power of the powerless.
