BEIJING - A STATE-CONTROLLED English-language Chinese newspaper on Thursday carried an unusually bold article on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, calling the incident a 'sensitive topic.'
'Twenty years after the June 4 Tiananmen incident, public discussion about what happened that day is almost non-existent in mainstream society on the Chinese mainland,' said the Global Times, published by the People's Daily, the Communist Party's mouthpiece.
'It's still a sensitive topic. Scholars, officials and businessmen declined interviews with the Global Times on the subject. And searches for 'June 4 incident' on the Chinese versions of Google, Baidu and Yahoo were blocked.' The Global Times is not representative of the Chinese press as a whole, and overwhelmingly addresses a foreign audience, leading some critics to say it mainly serves to give China a veneer of openness.
The paper described the scene on Tiananmen Square on the eve of the anniversary Wednesday, saying that crowds of tourists mixed with uniformed and plainclothes officers.
'There are more policemen than usual these days,' a retiree who jogs around the square every day told the paper.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands were killed on June 3 and 4 1989, when the Chinese leadership decided to quell seven weeks of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations with tanks and soldiers.
However, the Global Times only hinted at the violence, highlighting that soldiers had also died in the turmoil.
'My parents watched news broadcasts... the pitch-black burnt bodies of soldiers impressed me, but I had no idea what happened,' computer programmer Li Xiang, who was nine at the time, told the paper.
Most of the article was devoted to the argument that China had made the right choices over the past two decades, ensuring an explosion in wealth and catapulting the nation to the position as the world's third largest economy.
'History proves that we are on the right track,' said Liu Jiangyong, a professor of international relations at Beijing's Tsinghua University. -- AFP