China detains activists on Tiananmen anniversary

BEIJING: Chinese police have detained several activists while others were under surveillance yesterday on the anniversary of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown, rights groups said.

Six human rights activists, including the poet Liang Taiping, have been held by Beijing police since Thursday after holding a private ceremony commemorating ‘June 4’, the date in 1989 of the brutal crushing of pro-democracy protests in Beijing, the Chinese NGO Weiquanwang said.

They were suspected of “provoking quarrels and fomenting unrest”, said the group, which also reported another activist had ‘disappeared’ in recent days in the capital.

Nearly three decades after the crackdown by the military, the communist regime continues to forbid any debate on the subject, mention of which is banned from textbooks and the media and censored on the Internet.

As in previous years, the ‘Tiananmen Mothers’, an association of parents who lost children during the violence, were placed under heavy surveillance.

Zhang Xianling, whose 19-year-old son was killed in 1989, told AFP that when she went to a Beijing cemetery yesterday with a dozen other parents to pay their respects at the graves of their children, they were surrounded by security forces.

“We have been under surveillance since last week... 30 (plainclothed policemen) were at the cemetery,” said Zhang. — AFP