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."But perhaps the most poignant appeal was one issued by Ma Ying-jeou, the president of Taiwan, who has been working to lower tensions with the mainland.

Mr. Ma, who spoke more in sorrow than in anger, acknowledged that history is "replete with examples of accounts of bloody conflicts between governments and their people, both in China and elsewhere," including in the United States, Eastern Europe, Asia and, most notably, Taiwan itself, where an uprising on February 28, 1947 was brutally suppressed. For 40 years, a veil of silence was drawn over these events and it was only lifted 40 years later, after the end of martial law. Now, the government has apologized to the victims, paid compensation and erected historical monuments.

History, Mr. Ma said, "is a beacon that illuminates the way forward," adding that what he wants is not to incite hatred but rather "to learn the lessons of history."

It is true that there have been many cases of governments acting against their own peoples. And it is not uncommon for governments to try to whitewash the events, keep them out of the history books and not allow public discussion.

But, especially in recent years, many governments have come to realize that it is not only more just, but more healthy, to confront the past and, where necessary, to issue apologies and to offer compensation to victims.

Thus, the United States congress has apologized for slavery, the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, has apologized for the country's treatment of native Canadians, and the Australian parliament has similarly apologized to its native peoples for having "inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians."

Of course, it took a great many years before these governments gathered enough courage to make these apologies. But in the end they decided to do the right thing.

While 20 years may seem a long time to an individual, from the point of view of history, especially Chinese history, it is but the blinking of an eye. One must hope that, in due course, the Chinese government, too, will have the courage to do the right thing.

Frank Ching can be reached at Frank.ching@gmail.com