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Tight security at Tiananmen
Chinese police were out in force on Thursday to prevent commemoration of the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, a day after Washington demanded Beijing account for those killed.
- Reuters
- Published: 22:30 June 4, 2009
Beijing: Chinese police were out in force on Thursday to prevent commemoration of the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, a day after Washington demanded Beijing account for those killed.
Tanks rolled into the square before dawn on June 4, 1989, to crush weeks of student and worker protests. The ruling Communist Party has never released a death toll and fears any public marking of the crackdown could undermine its hold on power.
China has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Market reforms have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and transformed China into the world's third-largest economy, making similar protests on the same scale was highly unlikely.
The 1989 killings strained ties between Washington and Beijing and the reverberations were evident on the eve of the anniversary.
Authorities blocked access to the social messaging site Twitter (www.twitter.com), online photo sharing service Flickr (www.flickr.com), as well as briefly to email provider Hotmail. Foreign newscasts about the anniversary have been cut.
"The leaders would rather just avoid this topic," said Zhang Boshu, a philosopher in Beijing who has urged a public reckoning with the killings. "They know that the 1989 crackdown, shooting their own citizens, was a terrible blow to their legitimacy."
Foreign reporters were barred from the Beijing courtyard home of late reformist leader Zhao Ziyang, in a quiet alley crawling with plain-clothes police and security volunteers who sat on stools sipping tea. Security officials also tightly controlled access to Beijing universities.
Dissidents have been detained or harassed, including Zeng Jinyan, wife of detained AIDS activist Hu Jia, prompting anger from rights groups.
Some Chinese activists and intellectuals recently urged the government to repent for the killings and start on a course of political liberalisation.
But China's leaders have shown no appetite for such steps, often saying that top-down political control is needed to guard economic growth.
Thousands of people in Hong Kong are expected to attend a candlelight vigil to commemorate the victims, as they do every year, and in Taiwan activists also marked the anniversary.
The president of Taiwan, a self-ruled island claimed by China, told Beijing to face up to the truth.
"This painful period of history must be faced with courage and cannot be intentionally ducked," President Ma Ying-jeou said in a statement.
While mention of the crackdown is taboo in Chinese media, dissidents have again been trying to get the government to reassess its official verdict on the incident, which is that it was a counter-revolutionary plot.
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