On December 22, 2021, just before midnight, the original “Pillar of Shame” statue was removed by masked workers from Hong Kong University, where it has stood for more than 24 years.

The sculpture – dismembered and broken into three parts – was draped in white wrapping, reminiscent of a burial shroud.

The Pillar is deeply personal to me. Its arrival in Hong Kong in 1997 forged a friendship between Jens Galschiøt, the artist, and my father, the Rev. Chu Yiu Ming, one of the founding members of the Hong Kong Alliance, which was formed in 1989 in support of the Tiananmen Square protest. It then evolved to become the leading voice to commemorate the brutal crackdown and kept the memories alive by organizing the annual candlelight vigil on June 4th in Hong Kong.

The Pillar’s removal in 2021 spurred my pilgrimage to Jens’ sprawling studio in Odense, Denmark, to launch our shared mission to ensure that the Pillar, the memories of those killed at Tiananmen Square, and those who kept those forbidden memories alive in Hong Kong will not fade and disappear.

To understand how we arrived at this moment, one must understand the original intention behind erecting the statue in Hong Kong.

The Pillar is a haunting memorial of the bloody massacre at Tiananmen Square. For Hong Kongers, it served as the conscience of a nation under state-imposed amnesia.

In the mainland, any mention of Tiananmen Square, baking a cake in the shape of a tank, or any sequence of numbers that include “8964” are banned and jailable offenses.

The Pillar reminded us of the shameful event on June 4 and the dehumanization of its people by the Chinese Communist Party. Never again.

But the Pillar served another equally important and subversive purpose – a canary in the coal mine – a warning mechanism against the erosion of freedoms that Hong Kongers lived and breathed.

Despite the guarantees the Chinese government made under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 that Hong Kong would retain its freedoms and autonomy post-handover in 1997, Tiananmen Square showed us and the world that Chinese Communist Party leaders were not to be trusted.

Jens wanted his sculpture to be erected in Hong Kong – the soon-to-be only place on Chinese soil where public commemoration of Tiananmen Square was still permitted. So, not knowing anyone in the city, he picked up the phone and called anyone and everyone who might be willing to listen and help with the audacious plan.

One of the people who answered his call was my father.

Together with other pro-democracy leaders, they arranged for the statue to be shipped to Hong Kong just before the handover on July 1, 1997, and later fought for it to be placed in its permanent home on the campus of Hong Kong University.

They believed, rightfully, that the Chinese authorities would likely deny entry to the statue after the handover. But, more importantly, Jens and Alliance leaders saw the Pillar as a test of Beijing’s guarantees of freedom and autonomy.

How long would the new Beijing-appointed government allow such a public dissent of CCP orthodoxy and state-approved alternative history? How long before the regime would attempt to block and erase all mentions and references to Tiananmen Square as they have done in the mainland? How long before institutions like universities, student unions, and the Hong Kong Alliance face direct attacks and threats for exercising their rights to free expression?

The erosion to freedom happens with little or no warning – like the odorless and colorless toxic gases that canaries used to detect. The Pillar and those who helped erect it in Hong Kong – and activists who gathered each year to handwash the statue and thousands who gathered annually at the candlelight vigil – were the canaries in a city facing fundamental and unknown changes.

The Pillar was created to commemorate the past – and it was, and is, a daring, subversive call to action for the future. The 2021 removal marked a stunning and swift end to all the freedoms and autonomy once enjoyed by Hong Kongers – it followed the blanket ban on public protests, the enactment of a National Security Law that criminalized everything from speaking to foreign media to posting on social media.

Hong Kong Alliance was forced to dismantle, and its leaders were arrested and jailed. Independent media outlets were forced to close, their executives jailed, and assets frozen.

I am deeply moved that the Axel Springer Freedom Foundation has chosen to erect a replica of the Pillar in Berlin. To take a public stand against censorship, to commemorate those killed at Tiananmen Square, and remind the world of the loss of freedom for 7.5 million Hong Kongers.

Germany is a nation deeply familiar with the public practice of collective remembrance. Just a few feet next to the replica of the Pillar are remnants of the Berlin Wall that once divided a nation. A few kilometers from both are 2711 concrete slabs marking the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

We forsake our future if we choose to forget. But looking to the past is not enough – we must remember in a way that propels and obligates us to fight vigilantly and fearlessly against threats to freedom wherever we are. Our right to self-determination suffocates whenever we choose to stay silent or invisible.

A few years after their initial meeting, Jens and my father arranged for a second shipment of another kind. Watchful of the signs of the impending crackdown and repression from Beijing, they shipped years’ worth of documents, news clippings, publications, and photographs from Hong Kong to Jens in Denmark for safekeeping – to be preserved if the organization was raided and shut down.

Their premonition was once again proven right. The Hong Kong Alliance was forced to dissolve in September 2021 after 8 or 9 of its standing committee members were arrested – 88 days before the Pillar was chopped down and removed.

We are all canaries for freedom. I believe that the decision to remove the Pillar and restrict the right to remember Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong will prove to be a massive miscalculation by a regime deeply afraid of its people.

A statue or monument can be removed or destroyed, but ideas and memories cannot.

Chop down one Pillar, and replicas big and small will be erected in its place. In trying to stem the spread of dissent, those in power have instead unleashed something that is epidemically more contagious, dangerous, and impossible to eradicate.

*Samuel Chu is the founder and president of The Campaign for Hong Kong and a member of the advisory board of the Axel Springer Freedom Foundation