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May 30—The day China trampled on freedom

The Age -- There are dates in the history of the world that reverberate richly whenever the story of freedom is told: the years 1789 and 1989, for example.

In many parts of the world 1989 is remembered as a time when democracy ousted tyranny. It is the year in which the Berlin Wall was breached, and the Warsaw Pact allies of the former Soviet Union began to break away from Moscow's grip. In South Africa, the government of F. W. de Klerk began releasing political prisoners, a process that would lead a year later to freedom for Nelson Mandela, and then to majority rule.

In the China that Mao and Zhou built, however, 1989 is not remembered as a year of liberation. It was the year of the Tiananmen massacre, when the rulers of the People's Republic refused to follow the example of Europe's communists in embracing democracy, and crushed their compatriots who were calling for it. ...

In China today, 20 years after the tanks rolled into Beijing's Tiananmen Square and other centres of protest, the subsequent events still cannot even frankly be acknowledged as a massacre. The usual euphemism is "the June 4 incident", though official documents often prefer the circumlocutory phrase "political turmoil between spring and summer 1989". The gulf between official and unofficial casualty lists continues, too. The Chinese Government records 241 killed, including soldiers, and 7000 wounded. The Chinese Red Cross and student associations, however, estimate the death toll to have been at least 2000, a figure generally believed to be conservative. ...

China today is an emerging superpower. It may be the engine that will drag the world out of recession. As its global reach increases, however, its failure to develop democratic institutions will increasingly hamper its ability to engage fully with the world's other leading industrial societies. Whether awareness of that divide will foster another movement for democracy is unknown, and there is little that the rest of the world can do to help bring one into being. But the world can at least give those who died on June 4, 1989 and after the honour that is their due -- something their country still denies them.


May 30—Twenty years on -- legacy of a massacre

Twenty years after the Tiananmen crackdown, the full truth remains elusive. Yet dissident voices fight on to force China's rulers to confront their dark past.

BEIJING (The Age, John Garnaut) -- Few who were old enough to watch the news in 1989 will forget television footage of the white-shirted man, shoulders slumped, briefcase in hand, staring down an advancing tank on Beijing's Chang An Avenue -- the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

He became the worldwide emblem of the Chinese protesters who massed for seven weeks in Tiananmen Square to demand more inclusive and clean government. Twenty years on, the world still does not know his name or whether he survived after slipping back into the crowd. Nor do we know how many hundreds of students, workers and bystanders were killed by bayonets and machine-gun fire, or smeared into the bitumen beneath tank tracks, on the approaches to the square late in the evening of June 3 and through the streets of Beijing on the morning of June 4 and over the following days.

"Corpses littered Beijing's main boulevard, Chang An, with blood and torn limbs visible in several sections of the area outside the Forbidden City," reported Age Beijing correspondent Peter Ellingsen at the time. "One student as he lay dying scrawled in blood: 'Li Peng, you will never live in peace.' "

Li Peng was then Chinese premier, a key figure in the brutal crackdown, which the Chinese Government says claimed 241 lives. Critics say more died. But the outside world's fragmentary knowledge of the Tiananmen tragedy is infinitely greater than what is generally known inside China. The Chinese Communist Party has controlled nothing so tightly as this black chapter in its history.

In fact, the party delivered what became its final historical verdict six weeks before the massacre, via a People's Daily editorial: the protests amounted to "premeditated and organised turmoil with anti-Party and anti-socialist motives".

On the evening of June 3, loudspeakers in the square were embellishing the official record before the tanks arrived: "A serious counter-revolutionary riot has broken out in Beijing. Thugs have stolen the army's ammunition and set fire to army trucks. Their aim is to destroy the People's Republic of China."

China was saturated in propaganda before the blood was even dry. The white-shirted man who had stopped the tank, they said, was a "lone scoundrel" and the television footage of him "flies in the face of Western propaganda (and) proves that our soldiers exercised the highest degree of restraint".

On June 9, the paramount leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, called his generals together and signalled what would become a massive rebuilding of the party's indoctrination activities in every institution: "In the last 10 years our biggest mistake was made in the field of education, primarily in ideological and political education."

The party rebuilt its propaganda apparatus, re-educated and re-vetted millions of officials and extended its reach into every realm of public communication. Loyalty to the Communist Party once again became the primary criteria for getting ahead.

The party did not spare its own. Zhao Ziyang, then party chief and architect of China's economic reforms, had broken the unwritten rule of Communist Party life by refusing to sign up to the official story. Zhao was accused of "splitting the party" and "supporting turmoil". He spent the rest of his life under house arrest and died in 2005. ...


May 30—Killing the spirit of a nation

The Age(Peter Ellingsen) -- The Age's China correspondent in 1989 was  caught in the turmoil when troops opened fire in the capital.  Here is his page one report from the night the conflict erupted.

AFTER the shock of the first killings, when more Chinese students than I could count had fallen to the ground, and it seemed almost routine to see blood pouring from teenage faces, a Beijing undergraduate put his arm on my shoulder and in a low, resolute voice, said: "Make sure the world knows about this disgrace."

Awkwardly, we embraced, and he walked off to await the army onslaught, just 100 metres away. It was a touching moment in a night of unrelieved sadness. Ever since the student democracy campaign began seven weeks ago, it has been impossible not to be moved by the courage of the intelligent young people who have risked everything for an ideal. But in the early hours, as they stood in their jeans and sneakers and faced up to the might of a modern army, there didn't seem to be words to account for what was taking place.

They always feared it would come to this, and when it did, they showed a grit that will echo through history.

For a Western reporter out on the streets of Beijing, it all seemed too brutal to be true. AK-47 bullets make a terrible mess of a young body, and when a boy of about 18 is standing not 20 metres away one minute and lying dead on the ground, a hole in his forehead, seconds later, one can only recoil in disbelief. I never thought the military would slaughter the Chinese people, but they did, and it left me numb. ...

As the apparent architect of the massacre, China's paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, is reported to have told the only senior figure to publicly oppose using the army, liberal party secretary Zhao Ziyang, there were no votes in the streets.

According to accounts circulated here, Mr Deng told his one-time protege, "I have a million troops behind me," to which Mr Zhao countered, "I have all the people of China."

"Then you have nothing," Mr Deng is said to have replied.

 
May 31—WITNESS - A night with China's secret police in 1989

LONDON (Reuters, Andrew Roche) -- "When men speak of the future, the gods laugh," runs an old Chinese proverb.

In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, China's policy of "reform and opening" seemed to many to be in peril. Conventional wisdom was that it and much of the communist world were retreating into isolation, threatening a new Cold War.

But within months the Berlin Wall fell, and soon the Soviet Union evaporated. And China changed at the speed of light. ...

After 1989 China produced perhaps the biggest economic boom in history, until it could even lend America enough cash to ruin itself. In June 1989, all that would have seemed mad fantasy.

Then, the pundits had misunderstood what was happening. The democracy or human rights demanded by the 1989 student rebels were out of the question, but economic reform would forge ahead.

China's ruling party would not limp into extinction like Soviet bloc communists. It would let you become a billionaire, but not a dissident. It would not be mocked, and would keep its iron grip on power.

Vital to preserving that grip amid tumultuous social change is a huge and vigilant secret state, at whose heart is the State Security Bureau -- a shadowy political police force.

My experience on June 4, 1989, lifted a corner of the veil on that world. It was by turns terrifying, surreal and ludicrous.

After midnight I was in a crowd on Beijing's East-West boulevard, just off Tiananmen Square, watching a troop column march towards the heart of the doomed democracy uprising. The front rank fired straight at us. Some fell. After joining a panicky stampede, I set off in search of a phone. Suddenly the streets were deserted. I'd forgotten that on my route stood what was said to be a State Security base. Half a dozen plain clothes men ran out. They began by dragging me over a railing, skinning my knees, then frogmarched me into the base past a wall slogan: "Serve the People".
They bundled me into the back seat of a crowded land cruiser that hurtled off into the night. My pockets were emptied. "Give him the 'apron'," someone said. It was a blindfold -- but, for a European "big-nose", it was easy to peep out under it.

I complained. "Under the constitution, you have to identify yourself when making an arrest, and not use unnecessary viol--".

My escorts responded by slapping me over the head for a while. A man in the front turned, stuck a pistol up my nostril, and uttered the Chinese for: "One move and you're dead".

A knife sliced off every shirtbutton, right through the cloth. ...


May 30—Web-savvy & cynical: China's youth since Tiananmen

KAIFENG, China (AP, Alexa Olesen) -- Twenty years ago, on the night of June 3, rumors were flying about an impending military crackdown against demonstrators in Beijing. That's when Feng Shijie's wife went into labor in his hometown, Kaifeng.

The baby born the next morning, June 4, is now an undergraduate at Kaifeng University. After class, he plays games online or shoot hoops at a campus basketball court. He can list the latest Hollywood releases and NBA stats. But he knows next to nothing about the pro-democracy movement that ended in a bloody crackdown the day he was born.

"My parents told me some incident happened on Tiananmen Square on my birthday but I don't know the details," says Feng Xiaoguang, an upbeat graphic design student in faux Nike shoes and an imitation Prada shirt.

Xiaoguang is one of China's 200 million so-called 'post-1980' kids -- a generation of mostly single children, thanks to the one-child policy, born on the cusp of an unparalleled economic boom. Aged between 20 and 30, they are Web-savvy, worldly, fashion-conscious -- and largely apolitical.

Asked what kind of reform the Tiananmen students were after, Xiaoguang says he doesn't know.

"Did it have something to do with the conflicts between capitalism and socialism?" he asks.

It would be hard for him to know more. The subject is taboo. The demonstrations are classified as a counter-revolutionary riot and rarely mentioned in public. Textbooks touch on them fleetingly, if at all.

Few young people are aware that millions of students, workers and average people gathered peacefully in Beijing and other cities over seven weeks in early 1989 to demand democratic reform and an end to corruption. They are not told how communist authorities finally silenced the dissent with deadly force, killing hundreds. ...

The generation that demonstrated on Tiananmen Square grew up surrounded by political discussion, scripted as it often was, and lived through mass movements that demanded full public participation, notably the tumultuous Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976.

But the 1989 crackdown put an end to most public debate on the topic of whither China. Few now risk serious political discussion even behind closed doors, with good reason.
 
Consider The New Youth Study Group, a short-lived club of young Beijing professionals that met privately to talk about political reform and posted essays online, including one titled "China's democracy is fake." Four of the members were convicted of subversion and intent to overthrow the Communist Party in May 2003 and sentenced to between 8 and 10 years in prison. ...

"All those magnificent ideals have been replaced by the practical pursuit of self-centered comforts," says Bao Tong, former secretary to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader deposed for sympathizing with the 1989 protesters. "The leaders today don't want young people to think." ...


May 30—China faces dark memory of Tiananmen

BEIJING (AFP, Robert J. Saiget) -- Authorities in China are bracing for the 20th anniversary of the deadly June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, a pivotal moment that still haunts the nation.

The way the government will likely mark the sensitive date on Thursday -- with deafening silence -- shows it is keenly aware of the emotional scars that remain after the army ended six weeks of peaceful rallies in central Beijing.

China's Communist leaders have made any discussion of the brutal quelling of the student-led demonstrations -- in which hundreds, maybe thousands, were killed -- taboo, but dissidents say the public could yet hold them accountable.

"People remember this date because they want the Communist Party to take responsibility for the crimes it committed," said 53-year-old Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg after being shot by troops near Tiananmen Square.

"It reminds them the party will resort to unbridled violence whenever it feels threatened."

In a bid not to rankle the wary authorities, the main public commemoration planned for Thursday will probably be silent.

 
May 31—China’s Forgotten Revolution

BEIJING (NY Times, Yu Hua) -- This is the first time I am writing about Tiananmen Square. I am telling my story now because 20 years later -- the anniversary is June 4 -- two facts have become more apparent. The first is that the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests amounted to a one-time release of the Chinese people's political passions, later replaced by a zeal for making money. The second is that after the summer of 1989 the incident vanished from the Chinese news media. As a result, few young Chinese know anything about it.

But most important of all, I realize now that the spring of 1989 was the only time I fully understood the words "the people." Those words have little meaning in China today.

"The people," or renmin, is one of the first phrases I learned to read and write. I knew our country was called "the People's Republic of China." Chairman Mao told us to "serve the people." The most important paper was People's Daily. "Since 1949, the people are the masters," we learned to say.

In China today, it seems only officials have "the people" on their lips. New vocabulary has sprouted up -- netizens, stock traders, fund holders, celebrity fans, migrant laborers and so on -- slicing into smaller pieces the already faded concept of  "the people."
 
But in 1989, my 30th year, those words were not just an empty phrase.

Protests were spreading across the country, and in Beijing, where I was studying, the police suddenly disappeared from the streets. You could take the subway or a bus without paying, and everyone was smiling at one another. Hard-nosed street vendors handed out free refreshments to protesters. Retirees donated their meager savings to the hunger strikers in the square. As a show of support for the students, pickpockets called a moratorium.

If you live in a Chinese city, you’re always aware that you are surrounded by a lot of people. But it was only with the mass protests in Tiananmen Square that it really came home to me -- China is the world’s most populous nation. Students who had poured into Beijing from other parts of the country stood in the square or on a street corner, giving speeches day after day until their throats grew hoarse and they lost their voices. Their audience -- whether wizened old men or mothers with babies in their arms -- nodded repeatedly and applauded warmly, however immature the students’ faces or naïve their views.

When I made a trip to my home in Zhejiang at the end of May, I had no idea when the protests would end. But I took the train back on the afternoon of June 3, and as I woke the next morning on our approach to Beijing, the radio was broadcasting the news that the army was now in Tiananmen Square.

The protests quickly subsided amid the gunfire. Students began to abandon Beijing in droves. When I left for the station again on June 7, there was hardly a pedestrian to be seen, only smoke rising from some charred vehicles and -- as my classmates and I crossed an overpass -- a tank stationed there, its barrel pointing menacingly at us. ...
 
... I spent the next month holed up in Shijiazhuang, but I had a hard time writing. Every day the television repeatedly broadcast shots of students on the wanted list being taken into custody. Far from home, in my cheerless hotel room, I saw the despairing looks on the faces of the captured students and heard the crowing of the news announcers, and a chill went down my spine.

Then one day, the picture on my TV screen changed completely. The images of detained suspects were replaced by scenes of prosperity throughout the motherland. The announcer switched from passionately denouncing the crimes of the captured students to cheerfully lauding our nation's progress.

Today, few young Chinese know anything about what happened at Tiananmen Square, and those who do only say vaguely, "A lot of people in the streets then, that's what I heard." ...
 

May 31—Tiananmen: A battle of remembering vs. forgetting

BEIJING (Associated Press, Charles Hutzler) -- As a young poet, Cui Weiping was not much interested in politics. But she says she could never shake the image of her husband returning home on a June night 20 years ago, his pants mottled with the blood of people shot by the Chinese army.

Now Cui is speaking out, trying to rescue the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement and its violent end from a powerful government heavily invested in suppressing their very mention.

With the approach Thursday of the 20th anniversary of  "six-four," Chinese shorthand for the June 4 crackdown date, this Beijing Film Academy professor feels a duty to remember.

"Opening fire was not our responsibility these 20 years. But not talking about six-four has been our responsibility these 20 years," said Cui, a slight, soft-spoken woman with a pixie-ish haircut.

In mid-May, 53-year-old Cui gave a speech on the duty to speak out to small gathering of like-minded liberals. She posted her comments -- "Are we intending to continue this silence?" -- on her blog. They were excised by censors from the Chinese site but then reposted by others and removed again repeatedly.

Two decades on, the events in the heart of the Chinese capital and elsewhere remain an essential issue for some Chinese even as the authoritarian government has largely succeeded in turning it into a non-issue for many, using stunning economic growth, sophisticated propaganda and repression to stifle public discussion.

The struggle matters because as China becomes economically and diplomatically stronger, its leaders and supporters point to their system as a model, an alternative to the capitalist, democratic West teetering in financial crisis. Gleaming rebuilt cities like Shanghai and the grand, flawless Beijing Olympics are what the Chinese leadership wants to be associated with, not the crackdown. Tiananmen Square has been remodeled too, with patches of grass to make it look less cold and forbidding.

The trouble is, the memories keep percolating. "Eighty-nine is like a dead rat in the Chinese political system. It's getting stinkier by the day," said Anne-Marie Brady, a Chinese politics expert at New Zealand's University of Canterbury. "It has to be dealt with at some point." ...


May 31—Wang Dan on Tiananmen in 1989: I'm proud

BEIJING (AFP, Pascale Trouillaud) -- Wang Dan, who once topped the Chinese government's most wanted list of leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement, remains fiercely proud of his role, despite years in jail and exile.

"We lost a lot but we gained a lot too... I'm proud every time I think about it," Wang told AFP in an interview from Taiwan.

Twenty years on he has no regrets over the tumultuous period that transformed him from a college student to a counter-revolutionary. Along with other student leaders like Chai Ling and Wu'er Kaixi, Wang led six weeks of peaceful protests from makeshift tents on Tiananmen Square, turning the movement into the biggest threat ever to Communist Party rule.

"We did not make sufficient preparation at the time," Wang said of his eventual capture and nearly seven years of imprisonment.

In 1998 he was expelled to the United States following an international campaign for his release. He graduated with a doctorate in history from Harvard University in 2008 and currently is a senior associate member of Oxford University where he continues his fight to bring democracy to China.

A photo of Wang in Tiananmen Square epitomises youth in revolt. Microphone in hand, long floppy hair brushed away from big, round glasses, Wang thoughtfully harangues the crowd with a tense look on his face. At the time he was 20 years old.

"We are going to take back the powers of democracy and freedom from the hands of that gang of old men who have grabbed those powers away from us," Wang said in his first speech at the end of April 1989.

"What was the most memorable for me was the demonstration on April 27," Wang told AFP in an interview conducted 20 years later.

"There were banners everywhere. This was the first unauthorised political demonstration in the People's Republic of China... the Chinese people had begun to speak with their own voice." ...

This week, Wang hopes all China will "be covered in white" following calls by dissidents to dress in the traditional colour of mourning to mark the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown that left hundreds, if not thousands dead.

And what has he himself learned from the history-changing events 20 years ago?

"I learned to be patient in waiting, being optimistic while facing the difficulties," Wang said.

"I am optimistic on returning to China. I think it will come soon".


May 31—China asked to respect its own rights laws

(TibetanReview) -- Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of Jun 3-4, 1989, Amnesty International released its annual report, in which it said the human rights situation in China worsened last year. It said China had claimed that last year's Olympic Games would mark a turning point for the country's human rights situation whereas what actually happened was quite the opposite.

"Actually, in China during 2008, we saw backtrack in human rights at least in a certain number of areas, including crackdowns on human rights defenders, issues on freedom of expression and certainly censorship of the media,” NTDTV Online May 29 quoted Roseann Rife, deputy director of Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific regional office, based in Hong Kong, saying.

The report notes that on top of the violent suppression of ethnic and spiritual groups, like Tibetans and the Falun Gong adherents, human or civil rights lawyers who dare to take on clients from these groups were becoming subject to harassment, arrest and intimidation. And this, it said, was happening more and more frequently.

The report also said torture was pervasive, although banned by law. Besides, it notes, laws in China do not definitively prohibit confessions extracted through torture from ending up in courts of law. In this context, the report finds impunity a major problem, with Roseann Rife saying, we really are calling on China to make sure that it implements its own domestic rules, laws, legislation as well as ensures the rights are protected in the international obligation it's undertaking."


May 31—Chinese leaders quiet on Tiananmen

BEIJING (BBC News, Michael Bristow) -- Tiananmen Square is the spiritual heart of China, where people fly kites, pose for photographs and gather on public holidays.

It is also the country's political home; former leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the communist victory from on top of the square's main gate in 1949.

But the word Tiananmen also conjures up more sinister images. It was in and around the square in 1989 that Chinese troops brutally crushed a democracy movement.

There is no reminder on the square today of what happened 20 years ago because the government does its best to ignore the massacre.

But those events are not entirely forgotten. There are some in China who believe there should be a reassessment of what went on.

One group that risks intimidation from the government by publicly calling for an independent investigation is the Tiananmen Mothers. This group is made up of parents and relatives of the hundreds of students and ordinary people who were killed when Chinese troops opened fire. In the run up to the 20th anniversary, it released a public statement to the Chinese leadership calling for those responsible for the killings to be prosecuted.

"The bloody 1989 Tiananmen tragedy was not a result of the government's inappropriate action, but the government's crime against the people," the statement says.

There is little chance the Chinese government will respond to this statement. As far as it is concerned the case is closed.

Immediately after the massacre the government declared that it had been a "counter-revolutionary rebellion" that had to be stopped.

It blamed a small group of troublemakers - the dregs of society it called them - for inciting the majority of noble-minded students.

When referring to the "incident" today, officials choose their words carefully.

At a news briefing last week Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu called it a "political incident that took place in the late 1980s".

He rejected the idea that the Chinese government has anything to apologise for.

"It is not appropriate for you to use the word apologise," he told a foreign journalist who had asked a question about the killings.

"Our [communist] party and government have already drawn a clear and unequivocal conclusion," Mr Ma explained. ...


June 2—China clamps down ahead of Tiananmen anniversary

BEIJING (Associated Press, Christopher Bodeen) -- Chinese authorities have forced a former government adviser from Beijing and detained a veteran dissident in a clampdown ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, reports said Tuesday.

Exiled former student leader Chai Ling, meanwhile, issued a rare public statement before Thursday's anniversary of the bloody crackdown, calling for the release of political prisoners, an independent investigation into the events and permission for former student leaders to return home.

"The current generation of leaders who bear no responsibility should have the courage to overturn the verdicts" on the protests, said Chai, in a statement distributed by the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

China has never allowed an independent investigation into the military's crushing of the protests, in which possibly thousands of students, activists and ordinary citizens were killed. The subject remains taboo on the mainland, with officials routinely countering questions about Tiananmen with remarks on how much China has developed and prospered in the years since.

"The party and the government long ago reached a conclusion about the political incident that took place at the end of the 1980s and related issues," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a regularly scheduled news conference Tuesday.

The government refers to the protests as "counterrevolutionary" riots.

Authorities have been steadily tightening surveillance over China's dissident community ahead of this year's anniversary, with some leading writers already under house arrest for months.

In recent days, Bao Tong, former secretary to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader deposed for sympathizing with the 1989 protesters, was removed from Beijing by security agents and taken to his home province of Zhejiang, according to the Hong Kong center. ...

Phones at the home of retired professor Ding Zilin, an advocate for Tiananmen victims whose teenage son was killed in the crackdown, rang busy all Tuesday. Ding had said earlier that security agents "strongly suggested" she and her husband leave the capital during the anniversary.

Elsewhere, in the Zhejiang province city of Taizhou, former educator Wu Gaoxing was taken from his home by agents on Saturday, shortly after the publication of a letter he had co-signed complaining about economic discrimination against dissidents, the New York-based Human Rights in China said in a news release.

The letter, addressed to President Hu Jintao and other top communist leaders, said former political prisoners are unable to find steady jobs and are deprived of medical benefits and pensions. ...

Calls to Wu's mobile phone were met with a message saying it had been turned off, while phones at Taizhou State Security Bureau rang unanswered. ...

Despite China's official silence, the crackdown remains a major topic for human rights groups and pro-democracy supporters in Chinese-ruled Hong Kong autonomous region, where this year's June 4 vigil is expected to draw tens of thousands.

Overseas monitoring groups estimate that 30 men remain in prison on charges relating to the protest, and Amnesty International issued an open letter this week to China's top legislator, Wu Bangguo, calling for their release. ...

 
June 2—Media censored on Tiananmen

Financial Times (Kathrin Hille in Beijing and Tom Mitchell in Hong Kong) -- In the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, China is censoring foreign media and the internet to an extent not seen since the crackdown that preceded the Beijing Olympics.

Government agencies are banning delivery of foreign newspapers, disrupting satellite news broadcasts and blocking internet sites including Twitter and Hotmail in a campaign apparently aimed at extinguishing every reference to the 1989 pro-democracy student movement, which the People's Liberation Army suppressed on June 4 of that year.

BBC News broadcasts were blacked out in Beijing on Monday night. Last Saturday's edition of the Financial Times, which contained an interview with Bao Tong, the most prominent Tiananmen-era dissident still residing in China, was either not delivered to subscribers or censored. Mr Bao was an aide to Zhao Ziyang, the late party general secretary purged in May 1989 for opposing the violent crackdown. Copies of the International Herald Tribune and Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, which has dedicated extensive coverage to the anniversary, have been shredded. The government has censored Tiananmen-related stories on ftchinese.com, the FT's Chinese language website.

Most of the information plaguing censors is flowing in from Hong Kong, one of only two Chinese special administrative regions where freedom of press and assembly is still respected.

In contrast to the state-enforced amnesia in China, civic organisations in Hong Kong are marking the anniversary with marches, speeches, art shows and rallies, which will culminate in a vigil on Thursday night.

"If you do not respect the dead you cannot respect the living," Cardinal Joseph Zen, a persona non grata in China for his uncompromising stance on freedom and democracy, said in an address to Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club this week. "I feel very proud that Hong Kong people are [so] stubborn in celebrating the anniversary."
 
"There is still sufficient room for us to fight for a more democratic system [in Hong Kong]," Albert Ho, chairman of the territory's Democratic party, told an academic conference. "I think the experience of Hong Kong will serve as a useful model for [democratic development in] China."
 
Blanket bans have returned to the internet in Beijing, replacing what had been a more sophisticated mix of self-censorship requirements for website hosts, news portals and bloggers.

Access to Taiwanese news outlets, which had been gradually opened over the past few years, has also been rescinded. The website of Hong Kong's FCC, which is also this week hosting a talk by the editor of  "Prisoner of the State," is still accessible -- but not the pages highlighting speaker events.

On the whole, however, the censors' work is patchy. While Google News searches for topics unrelated to Tiananmen intermittently turn-up blank pages, a video of a Tiananmen memorial rally was still accessible on the South China Morning Post's website on Tuesday.