Tiananmen Square incident remembered

Beijing: China on Wednesday imposed smothering security in central Beijing on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a bloody watershed in history that remains a taboo topic in the communist nation. The US demanded the release of scores of people detained in the run-up to the anniversary, as the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong prepared for an annual candlelit vigil that this year is expected to draw as many as 200,000.

Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, who makes an annual statement marking the anniversary, described the 1989 crackdown as “an enormous historical wound”. Thousands of police and other security forces, some armed with automatic rifles, have been deployed across the capital. There were numerous police trucks on and around Tiananmen Square Wednesday, with fire engines and ambulances also visible.

Hundreds of unarmed civilians – by some estimates, more than 1,000 – were killed during the June 3-4 crackdown of 1989, when soldiers crushed months of peaceful protests by students who were demanding political reform to match China’s nascent economic opening up.

Since then China has worked hard to erase public memories of the bloodshed, censoring any mention of the incident from online social networks and detaining scores of activists, lawyers, artists and relatives of victims in recent weeks. In 1989 the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown played out on television screens across the world, and Beijing briefly became a pariah in the West.