A Chinese dissident known for regularly commemorating the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square has fled to Taiwan where he pleaded for help in seeking asylum in the US or Canada. In a video posted online on Friday, Chen Siming said he was in the transit area at Taoyuan international airport to escape Chinese political persecution. “The Chinese police’s stability maintenance methods directed towards me were becoming more and more cruel and crazy,” he said in his post. “They detained me at will without following legal procedures,…
Tag: Tiananmen Square protests 1989
Isabel Crook obituary
The pioneering anthropologist Isabel Crook, who has died aged 107, was the last survivor of that generation of sympathetic westerners who joined Mao Zedong’s rural revolution and stayed on after 1949 to build a “new China” – with mixed fortunes. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) her husband David Crook was accused of spying and imprisoned for five years, while Isabel was locked up for three years on their college campus. The couple retained their belief in the post-Mao leadership of the Communist party until, horrified by the Beijing massacre in…
Torches and T-shirts: Hongkongers defy attempts to forget Tiananmen
For the past three years, Hong Kong authorities have gone to great lengths to stop people from lighting candles in Victoria Park and publicly commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre – an annual tradition tens of thousands of residents had kept alive for three decades since the bloody crackdown in 1989. This year, the city took it a step further. On Sunday, in place of a mass vigil was a patriotic carnival held by pro-Beijing groups, celebrating the city’s return to Chinese rule with food booths, and dance and music performances.…
Hong Kong police arrest pro-democracy figures on Tiananmen Square anniversary
Hong Kong police have detained several pro-democracy figures attempting to commemorate the 34th anniversary of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in China. For years, Hongkongers would converge on the city’s Victoria Park and its surrounding neighbourhood to commemorate the events of 4 June 1989, taking part in candlelight vigils. But since Beijing’s imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong in 2020 to quell dissent, the annual vigil has been banned and the organisers were charged under the law. This weekend, scores of police were deployed in the area,…
Hong Kong police detain eight people on eve of Tiananmen anniversary
Hong Kong police detained eight people, including activists and artists, on the eve of the 34th anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown, a move that signals the city’s shrinking freedom of expression. Police said in a statement late on Saturday that four people had been arrested for allegedly disrupting order in public spaces or carrying out acts with seditious intent. Four others were taken away for investigation on suspicion of breaching public peace. Authorities did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment late on Saturday. The bloody 1989 clampdown…
Tiananmen massacre museum opens in New York despite fear of Beijing backlash
When Zhou Fengsuo was looking for a space in New York to display his art collection, he couldn’t believe his luck when he stumbled across 894 6th Avenue in the heart of midtown Manhattan. The numbers of the address – 8946 – were the same as the date he wanted to commemorate: 4 June 1989. It was “unbelievable”, the former student leader marvelled. That Zhou’s collection, which opened to the public on Friday as part of the June 4th Memorial Museum, ended up in such an uncanny location is the…
Chinese censors remove protest site Sitong Bridge from online maps
Chinese censors scrubbing the internet of any words or symbols that could be used to reference the Tiananmen Square massacre in the run-up to Sunday’s anniversary have a new target in their sights: a bridge in Beijing where a rare protest was staged last year. As the 34th anniversary of the 1989 massacre approaches, anyone searching in Chinese for Sitong Bridge on Baidu maps will draw a blank. On 13 October 2022 white banners with large red characters criticising the Chinese Communist party (CCP) were hung over the bridge near…
Tiananmen Square books removed from Hong Kong libraries in run-up to anniversary
Books about the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protest movements, and other subjects deemed politically sensitive by Beijing have been removed from the former British colony’s public libraries in the lead-up to the 34th anniversary of the killings. Hong Kong media have reported a marked increase in the number of book and documentary removals, which have been growing since the authoritarian clampdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and the introduction of the national security law in 2020. It has resulted in a major curtailing of political freedoms in the city,…
Doctor who exposed China’s cover-up of Sars crisis dies aged 91
A military surgeon who exposed the Chinese government’s cover-up of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic 20 years ago and lived for years under intermittent house arrest has died in Beijing. He was 91. Dr Jiang Yanyong died of pneumonia and other illnesses on Saturday, according to two of his friends. A person who answered the phone at his home confirmed his death but declined to talk further. Jiang had been in ill health in the past few years. Jiang, who had been the chief surgeon at the Chinese…
Hong Kong court jails Tiananmen anniversary vigil organisers
A Hong Kong court has jailed three former members of a group that organised annual vigils to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in China. Chow Hang-tung, 38, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and former vice-chairperson of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, was among those convicted by a magistrate’s court. The two others were Tang Ngok-kwan and Tsui Hon-kwong. The three were jailed on Saturday for four-and-a-half months for not complying with a national security police request for information. Speaking before sentencing,…