Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers braved thunder and a torrential downpour to attend a candlelight vigil yesterday marking the 24th anniversary of China’s bloody Tiananmen crackdown, as Beijing blocked commemoration attempts.
A massive turnout filled the former British colony’s Victoria Park in an annual act of remembrance for the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people killed in the June 4 and 5 onslaught in Beijing in 1989.
In Beijing, police blocked the gate of a cemetery housing victims of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators as part of a sweeping annual effort to bar commemorations.
Photo: Reuters
In a narrow street near Beijing’s Forbidden City, security personnel patrolled outside the former house of Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽), the former Chinese Communist Party secretary who was purged and held under house arrest for perceived sympathy with the protesters.
Chinese authorities also blocked online searches for a wide range of keywords ranging from “Tiananmen” to “candle” on Sina Weibo (新浪微博), China’s version of Twitter.
Hong Kong and Macau, which reverted to Beijing’s rule in the late 1990s but have semi-autonomous status, are the only places in China where the brutal military intervention is openly marked.
Photo: AFP
The event has largely been expunged from official Chinese history, but Victoria Park was transformed yesterday into a sea of demonstrators holding candles.
“Vindicate June Fourth,” protesters shouted. “We will never forget.”
“The candlelight vigil tonight has an additional meaning of not just condemning the massacre 24 years ago, but also condemning the suppression today [in China],” said Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人), chairman of protest organizers the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China.
Billy Li, a 28-year-old recent university graduate, said he was attending because the Tiananmen crackdown “has not been vindicated, because the truth has not been told.”
Organizers had said they expect 150,000 people to attend the event, including an increasing number of mainland Chinese. No estimate of the crowd size was immediately available.
“I hope the next generation will not have to suffer the red terror,” 42-year-old Pan Xidian from the Chinese city of Xiamen said.
“We have not given up,” the construction worker said, adding that it he was very thankful for Hong Kongers’ support.
Pan had traveled to Hong Kong for the first time to commemorate the crackdown that ended weeks of nationwide democracy protests.
Beijing has never provided an official final toll for the military repression, which was condemned worldwide. Independent observers tallied more than 1,000 dead in Beijing, without including victims elsewhere.
“I think all of us, even the new generation in Hong Kong, would have the same feeling that it is a tragedy and also an offense by the government to shoot people like that,” said Richard Choi, vice chairman of the organizing group.
“The problem is still not resolved, that’s why Hong Kong people have the same feelings and the same demands as they did 24 years ago,” he said.
The Chinese Communist Party branded the Tiananmen protests a “counterrevolutionary rebellion,” and each year Beijing pushes to prevent commemorations.
However, pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong have marked the event every year. Organizers said 180,000 people took part last year, while police put the figure at 85,000.
CHAMPIONS: President Lai congratulated the players’ outstanding performance, cheering them for marking a new milestone in the nation’s baseball history Taiwan on Sunday won their first Little League Baseball World Series (LLBWS) title in 29 years, as Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School defeated a team from Las Vegas 7-0 in the championship game in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was Taiwan’s first championship in the annual tournament since 1996, ending a nearly three-decade drought. “It has been a very long time ... and we finally made it,” Taiwan manager Lai Min-nan (賴敏男) said after the game. Lai said he last managed a Dong Yuan team in at the South Williamsport in 2015, when they were eliminated after four games. “There is
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to start construction of its 1.4-nanometer chip manufacturing facilities at the Central Taiwan Science Park (CTSP, 中部科學園區) as early as October, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday, citing the park administration. TSMC acquired land for the second phase of the park’s expansion in Taichung in June. Large cement, construction and facility engineering companies in central Taiwan have reportedly been receiving bids for TSMC-related projects, the report said. Supply-chain firms estimated that the business opportunities for engineering, equipment and materials supply, and back-end packaging and testing could reach as high as
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
Democratic nations should refrain from attending China’s upcoming large-scale military parade, which Beijing could use to sow discord among democracies, Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) said. China is scheduled to stage the parade on Wednesday next week to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. The event is expected to mobilize tens of thousands of participants and prominently showcase China’s military hardware. Speaking at a symposium in Taichung on Thursday, Shen said that Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) recently met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a visit to New Delhi.