A Chinese plainclothes policeman questions a Japanese journalist trying to enter Tiananmen Square on June 4, 2009. Foreign media were harassed and barred as China kept Tiananmen Square under tight surveillance for the 20th anniversary of its crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. -- PHOTO: AFP
BEIJING - CHINESE police were out in force on Thursday to stop any commemoration of the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, a day after Washington demanded Beijing account for those killed.
Taiwanese hold candle-lit vigil
TAIPEI - AROUND twenty Taiwanese protesters held a candle-lit vigil in the capital on Wednesday to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown.
The group, including several former legislators from different political parties, protested China's bloody crackdown on a peaceful student rally in Beijing in 1989, during which hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed.
Tiananmen 'sensitive topic', says Chinese newspaper
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.
BEIJING - CHINA remains firm on its verdict on the Tiananmen protest and its aftermath, the foreign ministry said on Thursday, 20 years after the bloody army crackdown.
'As for the political incident that took place in China and all related issues, our party and government have already come to a clear conclusion,' foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters at a regular briefing.
Tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square before dawn on June 4, 1989, to crush weeks of student and worker protests around the landmark. The ruling Communist Party has never released a death toll and fears any commemoration of the crackdown could undermine its hold on power.
The China of 20 years ago is very different from that of today. A booming economy on the back of market-driven reforms has put money in hundreds of millions of people's pockets. The 1989 killings severely bruised relations between Washington and Beijing, and there were echoes of those tensions on the eve of the anniversary.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded on Wednesday that China account for those killed. Mrs Clinton also urged China to release those still imprisoned over the protests.
'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 and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal,' Mrs Clinton said in a statement.
In a sign of Beijing's mix of confidence and caution, Tiananmen Square was open to visitors early on Thursday, but with hundreds of police and guards present. On the 10th anniversary of the crackdown in 1999, the square was closed to the public.
Chinese crowded the square to watch the dawn flag-raising ceremony that is now a fixture of official patriotic ritual. Many were visitors from outside Beijing and appeared oblivious to the sensitive date. There were no gestures of protest.
That hasn't stopped authorities from blocking access to popular Internet services Twitter, online photo sharing service Flickr, as well as briefly to email provider Hotmail. Foreign newscasts about the anniversary have been cut.
A Reuters photographer was stopped from taking pictures and told to erase those he had taken.
'The leaders would rather just avoid this topic,' said Zhang Boshu, a philosopher in Beijing who has urged a public reckoning with the killings. 'They know that the 1989 crackdown, shooting their own citizens, was a terrible blow to their legitimacy.' -- REUTERS
