Admission of Tiananmen must come

In Hong Kong, the annual candlelight vigil in Victoria Park was attended by some 150,000 people, who listened to excerpts from the late party leader Zhao Ziyang's memoirs, a taped message from Ding Zilin, leader of the group known as Tiananmen Mothers, all of whom lost children on June 4, 1989, as well as the speech of a former student leader, Xiong Yan, now a U.S. army chaplain.

In mainland China, however, there was no public commemoration of the occasion. Indeed, heavy security forces were deployed to ensure that there would be no speeches and no demonstrations. Dissidents and activists were rounded up, sent away from the capital, or put under house arrest.

China enforces strict silence on the topic. The Foreign Ministry could not prevent a journalist from asking for reaction to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's statement urging Beijing to examine its past and release a list of those killed or missing in the 1989 protest.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang responded that Clinton's remarks “disregard the facts” and added: “We urge the U.S. side to put aside its prejudices and correct its mistakes.”

Yet even this mention of what happened 20 years ago was deleted from a transcript of the press conference posted on the ministry's website.

However, this year has seen some change on the part of the Chinese government. For the first time, the words “June 4” and “Tiananmen incident” have appeared in official Chinese publications, though only in English-language ones. But it does seem that the ban on these terms has been lifted for the Xinhua News Agency as well as for Global Times, the China Daily and the Beijing Review.

But such terms are still banned in all Chinese-language publications. This means that, as far as the Chinese public is concerned, nothing has changed.

Aside from the United States, many other governments, too, have called on China to have the courage to confront its past.

Canada joined with the United States to demand a public admission by Beijing of those killed 20 years ago. Japan and Australia called on China to improve its human rights record and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, recalled that June 4, 1989 “marked a terrible sacrifice on Tiananmen Square.”

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