| abstract |
This dissertation examines mourning as a form of Christian moral witness and political resistance in the context of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, with particular focus on the annual June Fourth candlelight vigils commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. Drawing on Christian social ethics and engaging interdisciplinary scholarship in postcolonial thought, Confucian philosophy, ritual studies, political theory, and memory studies, this work argues that mourning transcends private grief to become a public, embodied form of protest that preserves dangerous memories and sustains movements for social justice.
The study examines how Hong Kong Christians have navigated complex church-state relations across colonial and postcolonial periods, acknowledging both their complicity with political authorities and their grassroots activism. Through an analysis of the thirty-year tradition of June Fourth candlelight vigils (1990-2020), it demonstrates how grassroots political mourning as ritual protest involving candle lighting, prayer, testimony, and song created a liminal space where participants recognized themselves as part of a larger movement for accountability and democracy. The dissertation explores righteous indignation (yìfèn) as a constructive moral emotion that channels grief into collective action, examining the advocacy of the Tiananmen Mothers as an embodiment of this virtuous anger that demands accountability while affirming the human dignity of victims.
Central to this analysis is the concept of dangerous memory, which frames mourning as a form of social remembering that resists state-imposed amnesia. The study reinterprets the second beatitude, "Blessed are those who mourn" (Matthew 5:4), through Hong Kong's vigils, revealing mourning not only as spiritual consolation but also as political confrontation with structural violence and prophetic witness to God's promise of liberation.
Written from a diasporic perspective under the shadow of Hong Kong's rising authoritarianism, this dissertation contributes to Christian social ethics by offering a normative account of how public mourning becomes a vehicle for social transformation. In contexts where power seeks to erase history and silence dissent, grassroots political mourning emerges as faithful defiance—a theo-ethical practice that bears witnesses to truth, solidarity, and human dignity in a wounded world.
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