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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

CHINA CRACKS DOWN ON TIANANMEN SQUARE

High security on Tiananmen Square



BBC - China has boosted security in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, ahead of Thursday's anniversary of the killings in 1989. Many dissidents say they have been told to leave Beijing or are confined to their homes. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people died in the Tiananmen crackdown, and open discussion of the events of 20 years ago remains taboo in China. Even in Hong Kong, where freedom of expression is guaranteed, some dissidents have been denied entry.





Xiang Xiaoji, now a US citizen, was trying to come to Hong Kong on Wednesday to join commemorative events being held to mark the anniversary. But he was refused entry and returned to New York. Another prominent protest leader, Wu'er Kaixi, flew from his home in Taiwan to Macau on Wednesday, but was detained on arrival. Mr Kaixi told reporters that he had wanted to go from Macau into mainland China, to see his parents.

On the eve of the anniversary, police have been examining visitors at checkpoints dotted around Tiananmen Square, and checking the bags and papers of people in the area. Some journalists say they have been turned away from the site.
Ding Zilin, the head of a group called Tiananmen Mothers - made up of women whose children were shot dead in the crackdown - has reportedly been blocked from leaving her home, as has the wife of jailed dissident Hu Jia.

Bao Tong - a former official who was purged for sympathising with the Tiananmen protesters - was escorted out of Beijing last week. The Chinese Communist Party has never held an official inquiry into what happened in and around the square 20 years ago, and discussion of the issue is banned on the mainland. In the run-up to the anniversary, the authorities are also blocking social networking sites such as Twitter and Flickr.

Even the architect of Beijing's Bird's Nest Olympic stadium, Ai Weiwei, says his blogs have been blocked. "Three of my blogs have all been shut down," he told the BBC. "I don't know the exact reason, but I can sense it's about the coming-up anniversary."

While one exiled Tiananmen leader, Xiong Yan, was allowed into Hong Kong at the weekend, another student leader, Xiang Xiaoji, and a Danish sculptor who made a statue entitled Pillar of Shame were both denied entry. As a former British colony, Hong Kong is guaranteed autonomy and freedom of expression by the Chinese, but bans on Mr Xiang and others are adding to a growing sense of unease over how solid the territory's rights record really is.

According to the BBC's Vaudine England in Hong Kong, the ruling elite of Beijing-appointed civil servants and powerful business figures believes closeness to Beijing is the only guarantee of survival. Yet the majority of Hong Kong people consistently suggest in surveys that they want the freedoms they were promised.






The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre (referred to in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident, to avoid confusion with two other Tiananmen Square protests) were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China (PRC) beginning on April 14. Led mainly by students and intellectuals, the protests occurred in a year that saw the collapse of a number of communist governments around the world.

The protests were sparked by the death of pro-market, pro-democracy and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang, whom protesters wanted to mourn. By the eve of Hu's funeral, 100,000 people had gathered on the Tiananmen square. While the protests lacked a unified cause or leadership, participants were generally against the government's authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic change and democratic reform within the structure of the government. The demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but large-scale protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai, which remained peaceful throughout the protests.

The movement lasted seven weeks from Hu's death on 15 April until tanks cleared Tiananmen Square on 4 June. In Beijing, the resulting military response to the protesters by the PRC government left many civilians dead or severely injured. The number of deaths is not known and many different estimates exist. There were early reports of Chinese Red Cross sources giving a figure of 2,600 deaths, but the Chinese Red Cross has denied ever doing so. The official Chinese government figure is 241 dead, including soldiers, and 7,000 wounded.





Following the violence, the government conducted widespread arrests to suppress protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the PRC press. Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government.

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