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Hong Kong (AFP) - A park in central Hong Kong turned into a sea of candles Thursday as tens of thousands gathered to mark the 26th anniversary of China's Tiananmen Square crackdown, with the city deeply divided ahead of a vote on how to choose its next leader.
Six football pitches in Victoria Park were filled with sombre crowds who held candles aloft as they paid silent tribute to the dead.
Students later took to the stage and burned a copy of Hong Kong's mini-constitution, or Basic Law, saying it "restricted democracy".
Hong Kong is the only location on Chinese soil to see a major commemoration of the military's brutal crushing of pro-democracy protests in central Beijing in 1989.
Hundreds -- by some estimates more than a thousand -- died after the Communist Party sent tanks to crush demonstrations at the square in the heart of Beijing, where student-led protesters had staged a peaceful seven-week sit-in to demand democratic reforms.
"Tens of thousands have gathered every year to mourn your sacrifice... hoping your day of justice will come," said Mak Hoi-wah of the Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which organises the vigil.
"We will continue to demand an independent investigation into the truth."
The wife of one student who died during the Tiananmen crackdown wept as she thanked Hong Kongers for coming to the park every year.
Organisers said that 135,000 had attended. Police put the attendance figure much lower at 46,600.
The US called for "an official accounting of the victims" of the 1989 crackdown Thursday, as well as the release from prison of those serving Tiananmen-related sentences.
The State Department also urged a halt to the harassment and detention of those who want to commemorate the anniversary.
US-based group Chinese Human Rights Defenders said state security had detained dozens of activists in the Chinese provinces of Shaanxi and Hunan ahead of this year's anniversary.
Zhang Xianling, 77, whose then 19-year-old son was killed during the crackdown, said she visited his grave site in Beijing Thursday, where dozens of plainclothes security staff stood watching.
More than seven security officers remain near her apartment, with two guarding her door, she told AFP.
"Their main purpose is to stop me receiving interviews... and visiting areas deemed sensitive, such as Tiananmen Square," she said.
In Taiwan, prominent former student leaders who were at Tiananmen -- Wu'er Kaixi and Wang Dan -- spoke to a crowd of hundreds in the capital Taipei, some of whom carried yellow umbrellas, the symbol of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement.
- 'Fake democracy' -
The Hong Kong vigil comes as tensions are high just two weeks ahead of a vote on the government's controversial election roadmap.
It also follows huge pro-democracy protests that paralysed parts of the city for months last year.
The election proposal goes before the legislature on June 17 and lays out a plan for the first ever public vote for Hong Kong's chief executive.
It sticks to a stipulation from Beijing that candidates must be screened, a ruling that triggered last year's street rallies.
Campaigners call the proposal "fake democracy", and opposition lawmakers have pledged to vote it down.
There were some verbal clashes near the park between pro-democracy and pro-Beijing groups -- who support the government's reform package.
But there is also a split in the city's pro-democracy camp, reflected in an alternative gathering held by Hong Kong University's student union, which has taken part in all previous June 4 vigils and took a leading role in last year's demonstrations.
Organisers said they did not agree with the Alliance's premise that democratisation of China should be the prerequisite for democracy in Hong Kong.
"As we are Hongkongers we should focus on our local democratic development, rather than focusing on China," said Ben Tsang, a 22-year-old hospitality student at the HKU event.
In another separate event supporters of pro-democracy group Civic Passion burned a placard of three leading government figures, including deputy leader Carrie Lam.
But those at Victoria Park urged unity.
"This year I feel it's especially important to come out because people are saying the movement is marginalised or shrinking. We need to show that people's support is strong, regardless (of) who is leading," Walter Wong, 53, told AFP.
Hong Kong is largely self-governed and has far greater civil liberties than on the mainland, where public discussion of Tiananmen is forbidden.
A secondary school student joins last year's vigil in Victoria Park. Photo: Nora Tam
Hong Kong’s Victoria Park will become sea of candlelight tonight, just as it has been on every June 4 since 1990 to mark the anniversary of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Tonight all eyes will be on if, and how, the turnout for the annual candlelight vigil, which starts at 8pm, will be affected by alternative rallies at other venues and the growth of localism.
More than 180,000 people attended last year’s vigil in the park to call for vindication of those killed in 1989, according to the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which has organised the annual commemorative event since its inception. The previous biggest turnout reported by the alliance was 180,000 in 2012.
Police, however, put the turnout at 99,500, compared with 54,000 in 2013.
More than 180,000 people attended last year's vigil, according to organisers. Photo: K.Y. Cheng
Many mainland Chinese visiting Hong Kong are expected to join the vigil, with the city the only place under the jurisdiction of Chinese authorities where people can observe the anniversary in public and on such a large scale.
Radical pan-democratic group Civic Passion launched a bus tour of the city this afternoon to commemorate the pro-democracy movement. The trip around the city’s 18 districts is also a parody of top officials’ recent parade to promote the government’s political reform package from the top of a double decker.
“We are confident that we will be able to get off the bus,” said the group’s leader Wong Yeung-tat, referring to the fact that the 30 top officials, including Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, did not leave their vehicle to engage with the public.
The bus tour is expected to end at the Tsim Sha Tsui clock tower at 10pm, where the group will burn life-sized cardboard cut-outs of the officials in a way that imitates traditional Chinese tradition to burn offerings to the dead. Wong said his group planned no protest action after that.
Leaders of student unions at several universities have decided to skip this year’s vigil in protest at one of the alliance’s slogans: to “build a democratic China”.
Civic Passion member Cheng Chung-tai said that Hongkongers had no responsibility to do so.
“The assumption that Hong Kong would have no democracy unless China is democratised is fundamentally flawed,” Cheng said.
“Such logic has been poisoning Hongkongers for too long.”
The student unions of four other universities, including the Chinese University of Hong Kong, will give speeches at Victoria Park
Meanwhile, the student union of the University of Hong Kong will for the first time organise its own public assembly on campus in Pok Fu Lam from 7.30pm, to give mourners an “alternative” to the Victoria Park vigil.
The thought of localism has been gaining ground among some young people in recent years among growing anti-mainland sentiment. The term, along with the label “nativists”, has emerged in the local political lexicon to refer to people who share an ideology of focusing solely on Hong Kong affairs to the exclusion of all things national.
A member of a pro-Beijing group argues with Civic Passion's Wong Yeung-tat. Photo: Samuel Chan
The alliance, which was founded in May 1989 to support student activists in Beijing and helped some student leaders wanted by mainland authorities to escape, will be put to test this year.
According to a telephone survey conducted by the University of Hong Kong’s public opinion programme from May 22 to May 28, the popularity rating of the alliance dropped sharply to 44.6 marks, a record low since 1992.
The survey found 38 per cent of 1,089 respondents opposed disbanding the alliance, versus 26 per cent who supported the idea. Some 52 per cent agreed the official stand on the June 4 incident – described as a “counter-revolutionary riot” – should be reversed, down from last year’s 56 per cent.
Chinese paramilitary police march at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China on June 3, 2015, a day ahead of the 26th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests.. Photo: EPA
Users of China's most-popular real-time messaging service WeChat are allegedly being blocked from transferring money in amounts related to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
According to multiple media sources, and confirmed by a South China Morning Post reporter, it is currently not possible to transfer sums of money containing the numbers "64" or "89" using the Chinese version of WeChat, also known as Weixin.
When sensitive amounts are used, WeChat's "red envelope" money transfer system, which allows users to publicly send each other gifts, returns a message saying "Irregular transaction. Try again later." Other amounts were transferred without issue. Private money transfers were not affected.
A Tencent spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Organisations which monitor the Chinese internet for censorship report that, as in previous years, all references to the 26th anniversary of the crackdown are being deleted.
Digital news outlet Quartz reported that this has even led to seemingly innocuous messages being deleted, including one tweet about crude futures falling to US$64.88 a barrel, or news of a 64-year-old American woman returning money she found on the street.
Chinese internet users have long used virtual private networks (VPNs) and other tools that safeguard their anonymity, including the popular Tor program, to bypass internet restrictions.
This has become much more difficult since the start of this year as censors have tightened their controls, blocking many commonly used VPNs and all Google services, including Gmail and Google Search.
At the inaugural Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Asia in Shanghai last month, many foreign attendees complained of the lack of free and open access to the internet.
The irony was heightened by the fact a senior executive from blocked service Twitter was a keynote speaker at the event, which was supported by the Shanghai government.
US State Department-funded anti-censorship tool Lantern recently released an Android app which allows users in China and other countries where internet access is restricted to use Twitter freely.
Speaking to the Post, Lantern chief executive Adam Fisk said the app was far harder to block than traditional VPNs as its trust network-based peer-to-peer architecture required censors to know multiple private IP addresses to block each individual user.
While tens of thousands lit candles in Victoria Park on June 4, protesters unhappy with the vigil’s emphasis on mainland democracy rather than Hong Kong joined an alternative rally under the clock tower in Tsim Sha Tsui.
Police put the number of people joining Thursday’s rally, organised by Civic Passion and other localist groups, at 790. Younger faces made up the majority of the crowd, listening to speakers stress that local affairs should be the priority and call for a rethink of the role of Hongkongers in the national democratic movement.
Many speakers and participants had a dim view of the Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which organised the Victoria Park vigil to mark the bloody crackdown on the 1989 democracy campaign in Beijing.
“The alliance is behind our time, whether it is the form [of commemoration] or the demands,” said a 22-year-old participant who works in insurance.
“Patriotism has now become a controversial subject and it shouldn’t have been the focus in the first place,” added the protester, who joined the Victoria Park vigil last year. “It’s easier to reach consensus if we focus on, say, holding the culprits for the [Tiananmen] massacre responsible.”
Another rally attendee, who would not give her full name due to the “sensitive” nature of her job, said her main grievance with the alliance was that its leaders refused to pass the torch to the young.
“Just look at who makes speeches on stage, it’s always the same faces after all these years,” said the woman in her 40s, who was also at the alternative event for the first time.
“Independence for Hong Kong!” chanted Ray Wong Toi-Yeung, 22, a key figure in protests against cross-border traders earlier this year, as the crowd joined in.
“The meaning of June 4 is a reminder of the nature of this autocratic regime, that it is a regime which would not hesitate to kill its own people,” lawmaker Wong Yuk-man said of the Beijing leadership. He joined the rally after a bus tour around the city.
He then led chants of “down with the Communist Party” and chanted slogans of opposition to the government’s political reform package.
The rally ended at about 10.45pm, with the burning of cardboard cut-outs of the government’s three senior officials in charge of political reform as a tongue-in-cheek “offering to the Communist Party”.
After the rally, about 300 people, including blue-clad members of the group HK Indigenous, chanted “independence for Hong Kong” as they marched down Canton Road into Haiphong Road and Nathan Road. Police officers observed and monitored along the way and kept people on the pavements.
There were occasional rows with passers-by which resulted in brief disruption to traffic before the march ended at 11.45pm at Jordan MTR station.
[video=youtube_share;oCtBkrGC6s8]https://youtu.be/oCtBkrGC6s8[/video]
Published on Jun 4, 2015
ROUGH CUT. NO REPORTER NARRATION
Security was tight at China's Tiananmen square on Thursday (June 4), twenty-six years after the Chinese army opened fire on a student-led democracy protest
