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.

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

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