China is marking the 36th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on Wednesday, believed to have resulted in the killing of as many as 10,000 anti-communist protesters.
In anticipation of the occasion, dissidents have denounced Chinese officials placing them under extreme surveillance, intimidating and harassing them, and on occasion detaining and removing potential “troublesome” individuals to prevent any recognition of the occasion. In Hong Kong, fully colonized by Beijing after the 2019 pro-democracy movement, police have banned a decades-old candlelight vigil honoring the victims of the massacre for half a decade. Authorities warned Hongkongers this week to avoid any “illegal” activity and installed a “patriotic” food event in Victoria Park, the traditional site of the vigil, to prevent mourners from using it.
The Tiananmen Square massacre was a response to weeks of anti-communist, pro-democracy protests in the country, inspired in part by growing freedom movements in Eastern Europe and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. Protesters, many of them young students, organized peaceful rallies in Beijing, holding up anti-communist symbols and calling for a change in the murderous and repressive Communist Party regime imposed by dictator Mao Zedong.
The Communist Party responded to the peaceful protests by deploying tanks, launching a military assault on the unarmed students.
“The hospitals were overflowing with the dead and wounded. But the next day, the hospitals were emptied out,” Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher told Breitbart News, recalling the events of June 4, 1989, on the 30th anniversary. “The wounded were taken out — even those who were on life support who shouldn’t have been disconnected from their IVs — were all taken away in army trucks and never heard from again. They emptied out the hospitals of all the dead and wounded to try to destroy the evidence, and that’s exactly what they did.”
File/Student displays a banner with one of the slogans chanted by the crowd of some 200,000 pouring into Tiananmen Square 22 April 1989 in Beijing in an attempt to participate in the funeral ceremony of former Chinese Communist Party leader and liberal reformer Hu Yaobang during an unauthorized demonstration to mourn his death. (CATHERINE HENRIETTE/AFP via Getty Images)
No true death toll exists for the massacre, as Beijing endeavored to hide the true scale of the slaughter. Leaked diplomatic cables indicate that Western governments estimated at least 10,000 killed in the initial massacre, independent of the death toll in hospitals.
The Chinese government severely punishes mentions of the event and censors aggressively erase content on the Chinese-controlled internet about the killings, and even content that appears to allude to or may be interpreted as a reference to Tiananmen Square. Seeking information on anything online on June 4 could result in censorship in China, as censors have been known to block searches for the word “today” on regime-controlled social media.
Human Rights Watch documented on Tuesday 77 scheduled events to remember the victims of Tiananmen Square in 40 countries, none of them in China or Hong Kong. Dissidents exiled to Taiwan, America, and Europe, among other locations, have been at the forefront of passing down the legacy of those killed.
Within China, a group representing the mothers of the slain, many of them now in their 80s, traditionally meet in a Beijing cemetery to honor the memory of their children. They collectively publish an annual letter to genocidal dictator Xi Jinping asking for recognition of their loss and offer words of remembrance in the small cemetery gathering.
“We will never forget the lives that were lost to those brutal bullets or crushed by tanks on June 4, 35 years ago,” the mothers wrote to Xi Jinping last year.
One Tiananmen mothers, 88-year-old Zhang Xianling, told Radio Free Asia (RFA) this week that Chinese authorities had placed her under heavy surveillance for months, asking, “Am I that scary?”
Zhang, RFA noted, needs a wheelchair for much of her movement and poses no threat to the general public – or to the government, aside from her insistence on remembering her dead teen son.
“They keep a close eye on me,” Zhang told RFA. “I don’t know why they are so afraid of me. I am 88 years old and I have to use a wheelchair if I have to walk 200 meters. Am I that scary?”
The bereaved mother added that authorities ordered her not to speak to reporters about Tiananmen Square this year.
“They asked me to promise not to see reporters and not to say anything, I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ I said that if I spread rumors and you arrest me, I have no objection,” she explained. “I said everything I said is true. You (the Chinese government) don’t tell the truth, and if people come to ask me, won’t I tell it? If people come to me, whether they are reporters or not, I will tell them about June 4.”
“I will not stop fighting,” Zhang continued. “We want to seek justice for those who died in the June 4 incident. We have this firm belief, so we have persisted up to now. I just want to tell my children that Mom is still persisting, and also to tell the authorities that we are still persisting.”
In Hong Kong, once home to the largest observances to honor the slain in the 1989 killings, Beijing-controlled officials deployed a heavy police presence around Victoria Park and Chief Executive John Lee, handpicked by the Communist Party for the role due to his extensive background in security, warned that “swift and tough” responses will await anyone seeking to engage in “any breach of the law,” refusing to specifically address recognizing the massacre.
Asked at a press conference on Tuesday whether the government would respect the rights of Hongkongers to acknowledge the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary, Lee said, “any activities held on any date must comply with the law. They cannot break the law.”
“Law enforcement departments will target any breach of the law in a swift and tough manner in accordance with the law,” he warned, according to the Hong Kong Free Press. The outlet specified that the question he was responding to addressed the possibility of lighting a candle on June 4 or wearing commemorative t-shirts. Lee did not specifically answer regarding those two activities.
The Free Press found Victoria Park occupied by a “patriotic food carnival” and teeming with police agents on Tuesday in anticipation of the date. “This is the third year that the Hometown Market has been held in Victoria Park on the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary,” it observed.
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