China’s crackdown on Tiananmen memorials shows its obsession with security – and growing paranoia | Louisa Lim

Under Xi Jinping, national security has swallowed up all other state policies, and Hong Kong's activists are paying the price

Hours after attending a 4 June vigil, a Chinese student overseas is contacted by her father, bearing a message from the security services: do not participate in activities that might harm China's reputation. In a London theatre, three British actors starring in May 35th, a play about the 1989 Tiananmen killings, keep their identities secret and use pseudonyms. They take this step after actors drop out of a previous Tiananmen-related production in Arizona due to perceived risks to family in China.

Thirty-five years have passed since the People's Liberation Army opened fire on the Chinese people, yet Beijing seems more determined than ever to suppress acts commemorating the deaths of 4 June - even small ones far beyond China's own borders. Such repression appears irrational: its targets are not influential political figures, their actions are limited in reach and the acts of suppression affect basic freedoms in other countries far from China. Yet it is illustrative of the sea change at the heart of Xi Jinping's China. The man dubbed the chairman of everything" is transforming China into a security state whose top priority is the securitisation of everything, all the way down to the individual.

Louisa Lim is the author of Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, and The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. She is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Melbourne