New York City – When Zhou Fengsuo saw the duplicating machine for the last time, he was running for his life as the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989.

For weeks before that bloody night, Zhou had used the machine, which was then a state-of-the-art photocopier, to produce leaflets to spread the message of the Chinese democracy movement.

As one of the last student leaders to leave the square, Zhou tried to dissuade his fellow protesters from lugging the 18-kilogram metal block, arguing that it might be useful one day, and hauled it away on bicycles.

More than three decades later, Zhou was stunned to see that the bulky relic of the rebellion had been secretly taken out of China to a new museum in New York.

The June 4th Memorial Museum opened a year ago thanks to the concerted efforts of Zhou and several other veterans of the Tiananmen demonstrations who now live in the United States. The urgency for a new museum arose after the museum in Hong Kong was closed by authorities there in 2021.

“We saw this as an attempt to erase the memories,” David Dahai Yu, the museum’s director, told Al Jazeera. “We want people to understand why [Tiananmen] happened and what it means… to tell the story.”

On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent armed troops to Suppress mass student protests who have occupied Tiananmen Square for weeks. At least hundreds of demonstrators and passers-by, if not more, are presumably killed.

In the years that followed, Hong Kong held a mass candlelight vigil for all the victims every year without any intervention from the Chinese authorities, who even ignored private memorial services in mainland China. And finally, in 2014, Hong Kong Alliance The museum was founded by the Coalition in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which was originally founded in 1989 to support protesters in mainland China.

However, times have changed. Since 2020, the only city on Chinese soil where the public could freely celebrate June 4th is now under two draconian national security lawswho prohibit the annual vigil with Threat of arrest and imprisonmentJust two days before the 32nd anniversary in 2021, the Hong Kong Museum was closed and all exhibits confiscated.

“So much I never knew”

But not all was lost. On the contrary: As news spread about the US museum, more artifacts from that exciting spring in Beijing began to surface.

Shortly after Zhou and others spread the word about their new museum in the heart of Manhattan's shopping district, they received unexpected items: the blood-stained blouse of a reporter who had worked for the People's Liberation Army newspaper; the leaflets Zhou had distributed; a medal and a commemorative watch given to the “defenders of the fatherland,” as Beijing called the soldiers who suppressed the movement.

There was even a mint Nikko tent, one of hundreds imported by ferry from Hong Kong, kept as a souvenir by two protesters who were camping in the square as newlyweds.

Another object destined for the museum was an installation by the exiled Chinese artist Chen Weimin, which was exhibited for decades in a California desert.

Zhou, an avid collector of all things related to Tiananmen Square, told Al Jazeera: “I learned so much from this that I didn't know before.”

Zhou was sentenced to a year in prison in China for his involvement in the protests before settling in the United States in the early 1990s and founding a humanitarian NGO.

In recent years, he has helped protesters in Hong Kong who had fled surveillance and arrest. He asked some of them to fill a room in the museum with an illustrated timeline of the 2019 Protests against the governmentA hard hat and a yellow umbrella used by a protester were donated to the museum.

One of the 2019 protesters incorporated his fine arts training and renovation skills into the design of the exhibition.

“It is difficult to explain to outsiders why Hong Kong resorts to violent clashes,” says Locky Mak, 25, who landed in New York last year with only a backpack and wanted to be known only by a pseudonym for fear of reprisals. “Nevertheless, I feel that [the Tiananmen veterans] admire the people of Hong Kong and strongly support our struggle.”

For Zhou, all the commemoration is not just about the tragic end. “It is also about hope and solidarity: the other possibility for China,” he said.

But divisions soon emerged after Wang Dan, one of Tiananmen Square's most prominent student leaders and co-founder of the museum, faced a barrage of sexual harassment allegations and related civil lawsuits in Taipei, where he lives part-time and co-founded the New School for Democracy in 2011.

When a group of Chinese students in New York denounced Wang in a public statement, they were banned from holding events at the museum. Yu said he made the decision after they refused to retract their statement, which he called “one-sided.”

Even in its second year of operation, the museum, which is run entirely by volunteers, has limited opening hours: it is only open two days a week for four hours each day. Fundraising, which began in 2021 shortly after the Hong Kong museum closed and was driven by great enthusiasm, is proceeding slowly and is far below the original goal of $2 million. The $580,000 raised so far is enough for two more years of operation, according to Yu.

Jiao Ruilin, 31, began volunteering as a museum guide in July 2023, two months after leaving his hometown of Shanghai for the United States. Before that, Jiao had only learned fragments about Tiananmen by overhearing whispers from his relatives.

“The exhibitions opened my eyes to the damage the dictatorship has caused,” Jiao said. “Of course I want China to change, but I am also aware that the power of individuals is not enough to bring about change.”

Still, the Tiananmen veterans are determined to carry on. Aside from a few fake Facebook pages, there has been no transnational sabotage from Beijing so far, despite the country's growing international reach, they said.

Andrew Nathan, a sinologist at Columbia University in New York and co-editor of the Tiananmen Papers, a collection of secret official Chinese documents on the protests and crackdown, is convinced that the reopened museum plays an important role.

“There’s nothing else that keeps the memories alive,” Nathan said.