MCLC: vigil in HK

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: vigil in HK
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Source: NYT (6/4/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/world/asia/crowds-gather-in-hong-kong-to-
mark-25th-anniversary-of-tiananmen-killings.html

Crowds Gather in Hong Kong for Anniversary of Tiananmen Crackdown
By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — Tens of thousands gathered at a central park in Hong Kong on
Wednesday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square
crackdown, even as a stifling security presence in Beijing and elsewhere
in mainland China appeared to forestall protests.

The organizers of the vigil in Hong Kong said the crowd on Wednesday
numbered over 180,000, while the police estimated that 99,500 people had
attended. The turnout on Wednesday was the largest since 1989, according
to the organizers, and the second-largest, according to police estimates,
trailing the 2010 turnout, which was 113,000.

State-controlled Chinese news organizations largely ignored the
anniversary, even as the foreign news media gave it global attention. In
Washington, the White House said in a statement, “Twenty-five years later,
the United States continues to honor the memories of those who gave their
lives in and around Tiananmen Square and throughout China, and we call on
Chinese authorities to account for those killed, detained or missing in
connection with the events surrounding June 4, 1989.”

In the years since the crackdown, mainland China has combined rapid
economic growth with severe and recently increasing restrictions on civil
liberties. In the weeks preceding the anniversary, the Chinese police
detained and in some cases prosecuted scores of human rights activists.

Online censors have stepped up their already extensive blocking or
deleting of websites and postings that challenge the Communist Party’s
effort to erase the public’s memory of the bloodshed in 1989, when
soldiers in Beijing killed hundreds of students, workers and professionals
demonstrating for greater democracy and limits on corruption.

The crowd that gathered Wednesday night in Victoria Park in Hong Kong was
visibly younger than in previous years and included, for the first time,
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, a widely admired Roman Catholic priest who in
the past had held prayers near the commemoration but had not taken part.

In recent years, the gathering had been dominated by people age 40 or
older who remembered coverage of the night of the crackdown and who
sometimes brought their children. That demographic profile appeared to
have been upended this year, as people in their 20s and 30s predominated.
An announcer on the stage asked all those attending the vigil for the
first time to raise their hands, and many sprang up.

One first-time attendee, Rex Liu, a 27-year-old office worker, said that
although he felt regret that students had died 25 years ago, he was
motivated more by concern about the prevalence of corruption in
current-day China. “I feel the need to come this year to express my
discontent over the rotting and corrupt state of the Chinese government,”
he said.

The general silence about the anniversary that security agencies imposed
in mainland China left Hong Kong as the only city on Chinese soil where
such a public commemoration could take place.

Asked during a brief interview near the end of the vigil whether he was
attending the event as a church leader, Cardinal Zen, the retired
archbishop of Hong Kong and a longtime advocate of greater democracy, gave
a small shrug and a short, amused laugh. “No, no, no, I am myself,” he
said.

Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, published an article on Wednesday
quoting a government spokesman criticizing the United Nations’ high
commissioner for human rights, who called on Tuesday for Beijing to
release pro-democracy activists and others who have been detained.

“The so-called press release made by U.N. high commissioner for human
rights, Navi Pillay, grossly goes against her mandate and constitutes a
grave intervention of China’s judicial sovereignty and internal affairs,”
Hong Lei, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a daily news briefing,
according to the Xinhua report. Ms. Pillay had released a statement
<http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B9C2E/%28httpNewsByYear_en%29/3C3EA4F7BAE64E
93C1257CEC00531CB1?OpenDocument> on the anniversary calling on China to
free dissidents. “China has chosen a viable path to develop human rights,
and this is not to be changed by any discordant voice,” Mr. Hong added.

Among those who had assembled around Victoria Park was one man defending
the armed crackdown. He held a sign in Chinese that read: “Oppose
overturning the verdict on June 4; the democracy movement is a menace to
national tranquillity. Without a prompt crackdown, China would not be what
it is today.”

The man, Chiu Keng Wong, a Hong Kong resident and camera dealer, said he
was in China in 1989.

“People don’t understand the situation back then,” he said. “This had to
be done to defend reform and opening up. Older people who have spent time
in China understand my view.”

Several groups in Hong Kong allied with the Beijing government have tried
to make the case that dwelling on June 4 is politically unhealthy, and one
of them, the Voice of Loving Hong Kong, held a small gathering near
Victoria Park. Guarded by a phalanx of police officers and metal barriers,
the group had a banner urging the people of Hong Kong to “let go of this
burden.”

The democracy movement in Hong Kong has fractured over how to deal with
Beijing’s steadfast refusal to change its official stance on the Tiananmen
Square crackdown, and over Beijing’s reluctance to allow greater democracy
in Hong Kong itself. The clearest sign of that division was a separate
protest Wednesday evening on the opposite side of the harbor from the
Victoria Park candlelight vigil, which has been held every year since 1989.

The rival event, which the police said attracted 3,060 people, was
organized by the Proletariat Political Institute, a group led by Wong
Yuk-man, a democracy activist who is also on the 70-member Legislative
Council. He contends that the established pro-democracy parties are not
sufficiently assertive in challenging Beijing.

“The vigil has been held for more than two decades, and the significance
of the vigil is diminishing,” Mr. Wong’s group said in a statement Tuesday
evening. “It is now no more than a routine ceremonial event.”

Chris Buckley, Philip P. Pan and Michael Forsythe contributed reporting.