On the evening of May 20, 1989, in response to weeks of mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government placed Beijing under martial law. The following morning, in Hong Kong, far to the south, Wen Wei Po, the main Communist-controlled newspaper in the British territory, published a glaring white space containing four large Chinese characters—tong xin ji shou, meaning “heartbreak”—instead of the usual front-page editorial.