Tiananmen massacre remembered
Demonstrators demand rights for mainlanders 23 years after brutal crackdown
Tens of thousands of people gather for a vigil in Hong Kong to remember victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown 23 years ago and demand freedom to protest in mainland China.
HONG KONG — Tens of thousands of people gathered for a candlelight vigil on a humid Monday night in Hong Kong to remember victims of the brutal government crackdown at Tiananmen Square 23 years ago and demand freedom to protest in mainland China.
Demonstrators with megaphones competed with each other for the attention of the crowds who swirled around them in Victoria Park, vowing not to forget the crackdown, in which hundreds of protesters were killed. Some wore shirts bearing the image of jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo while others chanted demands that the Chinese leaders who sent troops to dispel the protests in 1989 be held accountable.
“This is my first time to see so many people commemorate the dead in Tiananmen,” said Ben Liu, 32, an engineer from Shanghai who attended the protest on the last day of a business trip. “I wish someday we could do the same in China to voice our emotions.”
China doesn’t allow mainland events to commemorate the crackdown and is trying to ensure a smooth leadership transition at the 18th Communist Party Congress this year. The party is seeking to maintain stability after the suspension of Politburo member Bo Xilai amid murder allegations surrounding his wife.
Tiananmen Square bustled with tourists, and there was no sign of increased security or protests. Dozens of police vehicles were stationed at the eastern and western approaches to the square, as they are on most days, and traffic crawled along Chang’an Avenue, the main route taken by the army tanks that flooded into the square in 1989.
“The current stability- maintaining force, including the police, has effectively stopped people from doing anything on the anniversary,” said Ding Xueliang, a professor of social sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “The cost of organizing any collective action is too large, the pressure and risks on individuals too great.”
A search for “Shanghai composite” was blocked on Sina Corp.’ s Weibo microblog platform, after the Shanghai Composite Index closed down 64.89 points. The crackdown began overnight on June 4, 1989.
Organizers of the Hong Kong protest estimated attendance at a record 180,000 people, Lee Cheuk- yan, chairman of the Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, said from the platform. Police estimated turnout at 85,000.
This year’s anniversary is drawing more scrutiny after Bo’s ousting, legal activist Chen Guangcheng’s flight to the U. S. and the suicide last month of a man whose son was killed at Tiananmen Square.
Bo, once considered a candidate for the Politburo’s all- powerful standing committee, was stripped of his post as party secretary of the municipality of Chongqing in March. A month after that, following accusations that his wife was involved in the murder of a British businessman, he was removed from the Politburo.
In the crackdown 23 years ago, Chinese troops fired on demonstrators who had massed in the square for weeks. The U. S. Embassy in Beijing estimated a death toll exceeding 1,000, and in Hong Kong, which would return to China in 1997, about one million people marched in protest at the time.
China “expresses strong dissatisfaction and resolute objection” to the “unfounded criticism of China’s government,” Foreign Ministry representative Liu Weimin said at a briefing in Beijing in response to a U. S. statement encouraging China to publicly account for all those who died, protect its citizens’ human rights and “end the continued harassment of demonstration participants and their families. Lui said it “deviated from the truth and interfered with China’s internal affairs.”
The Dui Hua Foundation, which advocates for prisoners in China, estimates the government is holding fewer than 12 of the thousands of people detained in the crackdown, according to a May 31 statement. The group said it hadn’t received a response from the government about such prisoners since September 2009. It listed the names of seven people it believes are still held.
Organizers of this year’s Hong Kong protests pressed for more people from mainland China to join, Lee said.