Hong Kong Pays Tribute to Tiananmen Protesters While Beijing Stays Silent

Hong Kong Pays Tribute to Tiananmen Protesters While Beijing Stays Silent
By SHARON LaFRANIERE and KEITH BRADSHER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: June 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/world/asia/05beijing.html


BEIJING — China blanketed Tiananmen Square with police officers on Thursday, determined to prevent any commemoration of the 20th anniversary of a military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that left hundreds dead.

Visitors to the sprawling plaza in central Beijing were stopped at checkpoints and searched, and foreign television crews and photographers were firmly turned away. Uniformed and plainclothes officers, easily identifiable by their similar shirts, seemingly outnumbered tourists.

A few pursued television cameramen with opened umbrellas trying to block their shots — a comical dance that was shown on CNN and the BBC. There was no flicker of protest. Other than the intense police presence and the government’s blockage of some popular Internet services, the scorching hot day passed like any other in the capital.

The scene was vastly different in Hong Kong: throngs gathered at a park on Thursday evening for an enormous candlelight vigil on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

The organizers said 150,000 people joined the vigil, tying the record set by the first anniversary vigil in 1990 and dwarfing every subsequent vigil. The police estimated the crowd at 62,800, their largest estimate for any vigil except the one in 1990, which they put at 80,000.

Hong Kong, returned by Britain to Chinese rule in 1997, is still semiautonomous and is the only place in China where large public gatherings are allowed to mark the anniversaries of the 1989 protests and killings.

The peaceful assembly spilled out into nearby streets, shutting down traffic. Inside Victoria Park, thousands listened to songs and speakers who recounted the events on the night of the crackdown. A half-hour into the vigil, the lights in the park were extinguished and the attendees lighted a forest of white candles in inverted conical paper shields.

Around the park on Thursday, numerous banners in Chinese demanded the vindication of the students and other Beijing residents who perished during the Chinese government crackdown. There were people of all ages, from gray-haired retirees to young children whose parents accompanied them to explain why they felt so deeply about an event that took place before the children were born.

Gary Leung, a 42-year-old interior designer, went with his two daughters, ages 8 and 4.

“I want to see Tiananmen vindicated,” he said. “I feel very old — I hope the apology will come before I die, and if not, my children will continue the struggle.”

China’s government has tried hard over the years to obliterate the memory of the huge student-led protests that shook the Communist Party and captivated the world for weeks. It stepped up efforts on the mainland to enforce a public silence before the 20th anniversary.

In a report released Thursday, the rights group Chinese Human Rights Defenders said 65 activists in nine provinces had been subjected to official harassment to keep them from commemorating the anniversary. Ten have been taken into police custody since late May, while dozens of others are under police guard at their homes or have been forced to leave their towns, according to the report.

Nearly 160 Web sites have been shut down for “system maintenance” to prevent users from mobilizing online, the report said.

A Chinese official reacted angrily to a call by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for a full public accounting of the incident. “The U.S. action makes groundless accusations against the Chinese government,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, told reporters at a regular briefing. “We express strong dissatisfaction.

“The party and government have already come to a conclusion on the relevant issue,” he said. “History has shown that the party and government have put China on the proper socialist path that serves the fundamental interests of the Chinese people.”

In a statement on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton urged China to publish the names of the dead, missing or detained when the military crushed the protest, saying an accounting would help China “to learn and to heal.”

“A China that has made enormous progress economically and is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership should examine openly the darker events of its past,” her statement said.

She urged Chinese authorities to release all prisoners still jailed for taking part in the demonstrations and to stop harassing bereaved relatives, who have formed a group called Tiananmen Mothers.

The president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, who has fostered closer ties with the mainland, also urged China to confront the episode. “This painful period of history must be faced with courage and cannot be intentionally ducked,” he said in an unusually strong statement.

Beijing newspapers were largely silent on the day’s significance. The state-run China Daily led with a story about job growth signaling China’s economic recovery.

Access was blocked to popular Internet services like Twitter, and to many university message boards. The home pages of a mini-blogging site and a video-sharing site said that they would be closed through Saturday for “technical maintenance.”

Some Internet users tried to evade the censors by referring to June 4 as May 35 on electronic bulletin boards or message sites. Others proposed wearing white, the Chinese traditional color of mourning, as a form of protest.

One government notice about the need to seek out potential troublemakers apparently slipped onto the Internet by mistake, remaining just long enough to be reported by Agence France-Presse. “Village cadres must visit main persons of interest and place them under thought supervision and control,” read the order to Guishan township, about 870 miles from Beijing.

Jiang Qisheng was imprisoned for four years in 1999 after he published a letter asking the government to reassess the June 4 crackdown. “They started watching me in my apartment building on May 15,” he said in a telephone interview Thursday morning from his Beijing apartment.

Ding Zilin, a retired professor and activist whose son was killed in the crackdown, told The Associated Press: “They won’t even allow me to go out and buy vegetables. They’ve been so ruthless to us that I am utterly infuriated.”

A former student leader of the demonstrations, Wu’er Kaixi, was detained Wednesday night at the airport in Macao, a special administrative region in China. On Thursday he was sent back to Taiwan, where he lives with his wife and two children.

Mr. Wu’er, 41, now an investment banker, said he wanted to surrender to Chinese authorities and face trial because he had not seen his parents in 20 years. “I also want to be in a courtroom so that I can talk,” he said in an interview Wednesday night from an airport detention room.

“We dissidents in exile, that’s what we do,” he said. “We try very hard to come home, all of us, but the door is shut very tightly.”


Sharon LaFraniere reported from Beijing, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong. Zhang Jing and Xiyun Yang contributed research, and Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Hong Kong.