Beijing was under heightened security on Tuesday, the 35th anniversary of the killing by Chinese armed forces of hundreds of demonstrators at Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989. Police in Hong Kong detained a number of people near Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, where the anniversary was commemorated each year until 2020.
The Hong Kong commemoration was banned in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic and has not been held since then following a crackdown on political dissent that followed the imposition by Beijing of a national security law. Diplomats from a number of European Union consulates in the city walked through the vigil site in Victoria Park on Tuesday evening but did not make statements or speak to journalists there.
Hong Kong police used a new security law to arrest eight people in the week before the anniversary on suspicion of posting seditious messages “utilising an upcoming sensitive date”. Asked at a press briefing on Tuesday if people in Hong Kong could still lawfully mark the Tiananmen anniversary, the city’s chief executive John Lee declined to give an explicit answer but said some people wanted to cause trouble.
“The threat to national security is real. Such activities can happen all of a sudden and different people may use different excuses to hide their intention,” he said.
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The official Chinese account of what happened around Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989, put the death toll at 241, many of them soldiers. But demonstrators and western governments have claimed that the army killed thousands of civilians and most estimates agree that the death toll was above 1,000.
The demonstrations began in mid-April 1989 following the death of Hu Yaobang, a Communist Party general secretary who had advocated democratic reforms but had been forced to step down in 1987. Students from Beijing’s elite Peking and Tsinghua universities joined other demonstrators in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu and call for sweeping reforms.
Their demands included calls for a free, uncensored press, an end to restrictions on demonstrations and the publication of information on the wealth of state leaders and their families. And they wanted the authorities to endorse Hu’s views on democratic reform, which included proposals for direct elections of some party officials in contests with multiple candidates.
As the demonstrations grew the party leadership was divided over how to respond, with some urging compromise with the demonstrators while hardliners led by premier Li Peng called for the protests to be crushed. A hunger strike by students in mid-May, when Soviet leader Mikhael Gorbachev visited Beijing, won public sympathy and a million people demonstrated in the capital in support of them.
After Gorbachev’s departure Deng Xiaoping ordered the imposition of martial law and after a number of failed attempts to reach Tiananmen Square in late May, the army arrived in tanks and armoured vehicles on the morning of June 4th. Journalists reported on the killing of hundreds of civilians and footage of a lone protester standing before a column of tanks was broadcast around the world.
Taiwan’s president William Lai said on Tuesday that he would work hard to ensure that the events of June 4th 1989 should not be forgotten. “This reminds us that democracy and freedom do not come easily, and that we must build consensus with democracy and respond to authoritarianism with freedom.”
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