Thousands of Chinese and foreign tourists flocked to Tiananmen Square yesterday, the anniversary of the deadly 1989 crackdown on mass pro-democracy protests, amid a noticeable police presence.
The sensitive anniversary comes as the Chinese government wages its toughest clampdown on dissent in years, rounding up dozens of lawyers, writers and artists in recent months.
Visitors clutching cameras and umbrellas poured through security checkpoints into the giant square, but many shied away from answering questions about the date or denied knowing anything about the events that took place 22 years ago.
PHOTO: AFP
A university student surnamed Li from Inner Mongolia in north China — where protests erupted late last month — said he was too young to remember the 1989 pro-democracy movement, but knew about it.
“I’ve heard adults talking about it. It was a university students’ protest movement,” Li, 24, said as he strolled around the square where demonstrators rallied for weeks for democratic reform before the army’s deadly intervention.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are believed to have died when the government sent in tanks and soldiers to clear the square on the night of June 3 to June 4, 1989.
An official verdict after the protests called the event a -“counter--revolutionary rebellion” although the wording has since been softened.
A number of plainclothes police wearing earpieces and carrying walkie-talkies wandered around the square as tourists happily posed for photographs in front of a portrait of Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
Rights groups including New York-based Human Rights Watch have repeated calls for China to be held accountable for its past and present actions, but Beijing on Thursday reiterated its position that the matter was closed.
“As for the political turbulence that took place in the last century in the late 1980s, the Communist Party and government have already made a conclusion,” foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei (洪磊) told reporters.
China attempts to block any public discussion or remembrance of the events by hiding away key dissidents in the run-up to June 4 each year, taking them into custody or placing them under house arrest, friends and activists say.
Since mid-February, as protests spread across the Arab world leading to the toppling of leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, Chinese authorities have detained dozens of lawyers, activists and dissidents in an ongoing clampdown on dissent.
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