China riots: 156 dead in ethnic unrest

Peaceful China sitting in the Angels House of the UN,
is killing peaceful protesters back at home where no-one can see...
Why is Satan allowed to sit in the House of Peace?

By John Garnaut

(SMH) - Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region in western China, was locked locked down under curfew last night after being rocked by the deadliest officially-acknowledged violence since the Tiananmen massacres of 1989.

The state news agency Xinhua said the death toll has risen to 156 with more than 800 injured, but it still remains impossible to verify who has been killing who.

The streets of Urumqi were deserted last night. Police road blocks throughout the city ensured the trickle of authorised traffic was confined to main arterial roads.

This correspondent was corralled into a minivan whose driver worked in the local Tourism Bureau, and who took advantage of his privileged road access to charge us more than twelve times the usual fare to get to us downtown.

Foreign journalists have been ushered to the Hai De Hotel, where they can file stories and receive online information at a specially designated press centre.

In contrast to Tibet, when foreign journalists were locked out of the region, The State Council's Information Office has decided to allow foreign journalists into Urumqi under controlled conditions.

But internet connections are unavailable elsewhere across the city while mobile phone and international dialling coverage appears to remain off-limits for most Urumqi locals.

Men in camouflage uniforms loiter on an armoured personal carrier outside the Hai De Hotel. Next to them are troop-carrying trucks including one which is decorated with a huge red banner: "The People's Armed Police Love the People, Stopping Riots for the People". (JEG's: does that mean "killing innocent people to stop the riots?" but who created the riot, it was a peaceful protest, not a riot.)

Elsewhere in Urumqi, it seems, internet connections and many mobile phone services have been cut.

Chinese official media have released only sparse details of the events of the violence and their causes, including television footage of burning vehicles and bloodied and dazed civilians, who appeared to be of the dominant Han Chinese ethnic group.

There are anecdotal reports of gunfire on Sunday night which appears to be corroborated by the background sounds in amateur footage posted on video sharing sites.

Uighur people now make up slightly less than half of the Xinjiang population, but in Urumqi they are a small minority, after waves of Han and Hui (Islamic) Chinese migration from the east.

The city is deeply divided on racial grounds, with Uighurs and Han Chinese often refusing to interact with each other even in commercial transactions.

In September last year, a Han Chinese driver in Urumqi refused to let this correspondent into his taxi before apologising to my Chinese-looking assistant: "I'm sorry, I thought he was Uighur".

Uighurs routinely boycott Han Chinese stores and individuals from both groups frequently categorise the other in offensive racial terms.

Uighurs have largely missed out on the region's recent resource-driven economic boom.

Since 1997 and particularly since March last year China's security apparatus has further inflamed tensions by singling out Uighurs for special restrictions and surveillance.

Uighurs on a plane from Beijing said their Beijing homes had been under constant surveillance yesterday by plain-clothed police, though they have no knowledge of or connection to the Xinjiang violence.

Today Chinese officials have said they will release more information and conduct a guided tour of the riot scene.

As of this morning, however, there remained only fragments of information and a trickle of unverified reports about what may be the deadliest violence to have rocked China in 20 years.

READ MORE---> China riots: 156 dead in ethnic unrest...

US calls for release of prominent China dissident - Liu Xiaobo

(SMH) - The United States said it was "deeply disturbed" by the reported arrest of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and called for his release amid a mounting chorus of condemnation.

Chinese state media said Wednesday that police had formally arrested Liu, a leading force behind a petition calling for democratic reforms.

"The US government is deeply disturbed by reports that Liu Xiaobo has been formally arrested and charged with serious crimes," Richard Buangan, a spokesman for the US embassy in Beijing, told AFP.

"We call on the government of China to release Mr. Liu and respect the rights of all Chinese citizens who peacefully express their desire for internationally recognised freedoms."

The 53-year-old writer was arrested Tuesday for "alleged agitation activities aimed at subversion of the government and overthrowing the socialist system," Xinhua news agency said, citing Beijing police.

Liu, who was jailed previously for his involvement in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement that was crushed by the army, has long campaigned through his writings for human rights, democracy and the rule of law in China.

He was taken into custody in December after signing Charter 08, a manifesto signed by hundreds of intellectuals, scholars and dissidents calling for political and legal reforms and respect for human rights.

The reaction from the United States followed criticism of the reported arrest by US House speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday.

"The decision by the Chinese government to formally arrest Liu Xiaobo deserves the full condemnation from the international community," said Pelosi, who is second in line for the presidency after US Vice President Joe Biden.

"Liu?s arrest for peacefully criticising his government and advocating for human rights violates provisions in China?s constitution as well as international human rights standards," Pelosi added in a statement.

Ding Zilin, a 72-year-old retired professor whose son was killed in the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, said the government had arrested a "moderate and rational" writer, in a statement released by New York-based Human Rights in China.

"If the often avowed... 'rapidly emerging', 'great nation' and 'superpower'... cannot tolerate a mere scholar like Liu Xiaobo, this is a clear enough indication that the regime of (President) Hu Jintao and (Premier) Wen Jiabao has already shut tight the door to so-called 'political reform,' she said.

"(It has) completely blocked China's path toward democracy and constitutional rule, let alone freedom of speech," she added in the statement co-written by her husband Jiang Peikun.

Brad Adams, Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the arrest of Liu sent Chinese citizens "a clear signal of political hardening."

"But it also misses an opportunity to show the outside world that the government is confident enough to tolerate thoughtful and peaceful domestic criticism," he said in an emailed statement.

Buangan said the United States had raised its concerns about Liu's status and whereabouts repeatedly both in Beijing and Washington, and would "continue to do so."

READ MORE---> US calls for release of prominent China dissident - Liu Xiaobo...

Pelosi says China stalling on human rights

(Bangkok Post-AFP) -US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that she saw no progress in China on human rights, regretting that neither economic reforms nor US pressure were making Beijing budge.

U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) arrives in D.C. for a "Remembrance and Reconciliation" rally marking the 20th anniversary of protests in Tiananmen Square in June 2009. Pelosi said that she saw no progress in China on human rights, regretting that neither economic reforms nor US pressure were making Beijing budge.

Pelosi, a long-time human rights advocate who visited China last week, deplored that Beijing was still holding prisoners for taking part in the Tiananmen Square democracy protests crushed 20 years ago this week.

"Twenty years later people are still being incarcerated for speaking out about anything other than the party line," Pelosi said. "I don't know that this is an evolution."

"I know that just our advocacy didn't accomplish any freedom in China. So somehow or other we have to find a way to do that," she told the Brookings Institution think-tank.

Pelosi said she praised China's leadership in her meetings for lifting millions out of poverty, calling it a "remarkable" achievement.

"The problem I have is that -- people say, 'Well, look at Taiwan, look at (South) Korea, different places' -- economic reform leads to political reform," she said.

"What I see in China is that economic reform is being used to suppress the political reform -- 'You have a job, okay, I'm happy.' So it isn't the natural peaceful evolution, which they will never subscribe to," she said.

Pelosi rejected perceptions that she had softened her stance on her recent trip.

She said she was able to raise human rights concerns at the highest level as House speaker, the third-highest leader under the US Constitution. She said she directly petitioned President Hu Jintao to free jailed rights activists.

Pelosi said she had no regrets about infuriating Beijing's leaders in 1991 by unfurling a banner in Tiananmen Square in tribute "to those who died for democracy in China."

"It isn't that my view has changed so much as my role has changed," Pelosi said. "This is a relentless pursuit of mine."

READ MORE---> Pelosi says China stalling on human rights...

A Tiananmen Exile in Los Angeles

by Mark O'Neill

(Asian Sentinel) -Twenty years after the 1989 crackdown, Beijing refuses to allow hundreds of those who fled abroad to return home. The most senior of them is Xu Jiatun, the highest-ranking Communist official to defect since 1949.

Hsing Yun, Taiwan monk rescued China's top defector after June 4

Xu, 93, was head of Xinhua News Agency in Hong Kong in 1989 and ordered into retirement because he had shown sympathy for the student protestors.

Fearful that he would be arrested and sent to prison, he escaped on a plane from Hong Kong to San Francisco on May 1, 1990.

The latest issue of the Chinese-language Yazhou Zhoukan has published for the first time the details of his escape and the key role played by a Taiwan monk named Hsing Yun, who was also banned from going to China as a punishment by Beijing for helping Xu.

Xu first met Hsing Yun in April 1989, on his way home to Taiwan, after leading a major Buddhist delegation to Beijing. Xu was ordered to give red-carpet treatment to the monk, a major 'United Front' target.

Both natives of northern Jiangsu, the two men got on well. In a letter of thanks to Xu, the monk invited him to go anytime as his guest in Taiwan or his temple Xilaishi (Coming to the West Temple) in Los Angeles.

After June 4, Xu was ordered to retire from his post -- the end of a 50-year career that began in April 1938, when he joined the Communist party and became a platoon leader in the People's Liberation Army.

Xu asked to live in Hong Kong or Shenzhen, to be close to the many contacts he had built up during his six years as head of Xinhua. Suspicious of his motives, Beijing refused and told him to retire in Beijing or his native Jiangsu.

In April 1990, the net began to close around him. On the 21st, he returned to Shenzhen after a meeting in Beijing and was preparing to move house to Nanjing. His secretary told him that his successor in Xinhua, Zhou Nan, had set up a team to investigate him and had seized from his home personal letters and file. Zhou himself was in charge of the investigation. Xu needed to move quickly – but he had no visa for the United States.

On April 27, Hsing Yun, then in Australia, received a telephone call from an intermediary who said that Xu wanted refuge at Xilaishi and needed a visa. Hsing Yun made the necessary arrangements and, on May 1, Xu took a flight to San Francisco, where he was met by a relative and driven to the temple, in a suburb of Los Angeles. His wife and son remained in China.

The news was greeted with alarm in Beijing. The escape was evidence of a continuing split over the 1989 crackdown at the top of the party. Officials called Hsing Yun and asked him not to accept Xu. The monk refused, saying that it was not a political question but an example of a Buddhist tradition to help those in trouble.

On May 19, Beijing sent its ambassador in Washington to Los Angeles, where he met Xu for two hours and asked him to go home. He refused: "it was very difficult to leave. How can I go back? It is very dangerous and could result in my death."

On a visit to Mexico in mid-April, the then president Yang Shangkun called Xu from his plane and offered to make a stop in Los Angeles and take him home. Again, he refused.

"I accepted Xu for reasons of friendship and compassion," Hsing Yun told Yazhou Zhoukan . "I helped someone who made a big contribution to China. It should thank me. The CIA sent people to see Xu once a week and offered him a home. But he did not need it as he was staying in the temple."

The temple was besieged by reporters; this persuaded Xu and Hsing Yun to hold a news conference on May 20, at which Xu said that he would not betray China or Communism nor have contact with journalists or the exiled democracy movement.

He lived in a room at the back of the temple for over a year before moving into a nearby home, which Hsing Yun believes was bought for him by a Taiwan businessman.

Then he began to write books and articles, especially his memoires, for which he received a substantial advance, enabling to move into a larger home, where he lives now.

Two decades later, Beijing has not forgiven him and refused his repeated requests to spend his final years in the land of his birth. His 51 years of service, military and civilian, to the party count for nothing.

Hsing Yun also paid a price for his act of compassion; he was banned from visiting China for four years, including the 90th birthday of his mother on April 1, 1991 in Yangzhou, which he planned to celebrate with 500 disciples.

But Buddhist leaders in Beijing were finally able to persuade President Jiang Zemin in 1994, arguing that he represented millions of overseas Chinese Buddhists as well as one of the major Buddhist movements in Taiwan. He is also a supporter of reunification.

Hsing Yun was allowed back in 1994 and 1996, but only to visit relatives. Beijing got its payback in February 2002, when Hsing Yun organised the exhibition in Taiwan of a finger relic of the Buddha flown from a temple in Xian.

The exhibition was a dramatic success; five million Taiwanese saw the relic, with an additional three million coming from overseas. It sent exactly the message which Beijing wanted – Taiwan and China share the same roots and the same religion.

Hsing Yun also played a major role in organising two World Buddhist Forums, in 2007 and 2009, bringing together Buddhists from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The one this year opened in Wuxi, Jiangsu and closed in Taipei, the first international meeting to be held in this format.

Beijing has seized on Hsing Yun as an important tool in its efforts to win the hearts and minds of Taiwan people. In 2007, Hsing Yun met Jiang Zemin, the man who had banned him, for the first time. Jiang had retired from office.

Both natives of northern Jiangsu, the two men got on well. "Often, a single meeting between people can remove all misunderstandings," the monk said.

Jiang wrote calligraphy for a large library which Hsing Yun is building in Yixing, his native place in Jiangsu province, a powerful official endorsement of the project.

"For the reunification of the two sides, Buddhism is the base. When there were no direct links, Buddhism was the link. When the two sides cannot unite, religion can unite first. We can do something," he said.

Xu is not so fortunate. Only an extraordinary turn of events will soften the hearts of his former comrades in Beijing and allow him to visit his motherland before he goes to see Marx.

READ MORE---> A Tiananmen Exile in Los Angeles...

Tiananmen dissident rebuffed

By Julian Ryall, Beijing

(The Age) -A PRINCIPAL student leader of the 1989 pro-democracy movement has slammed Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou's statement on the 20th anniversary of the brutal crackdown after a failed attempt to return to China through Macau.

Twenty years after his defiance made him the second most wanted ringleader of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, Wuer Kaixi says he wants to return to his homeland.

He marked the anniversary of the crackdown in a holding cell in the Chinese territory after immigration officials denied him entry to surrender.

"China will not let me return and my parents are prohibited from travelling abroad," Mr Wuer said in a letter shortly before he left Taiwan, where he lives. "I have not seen them in 20 years."

The Macau authorities refused him entry, citing "the maintenance of social harmony". He refused to board several flights to Taiwan but last night was forced to admit defeat.

Upon his arrival at Taiwan's Taoyuan International Airport, he criticised Mr Ma for praising China's growing attention to human rights. "Is now the right time to say good words on China's behalf?" he asked.

Mr Ma's official statement offered only weak support for the victims of Tiananmen.

"This painful part of history has to be faced bravely and cannot be avoided," he said.

Mr Wuer remains on the list of 21 student dissidents who Beijing identified as ringleaders of the Tiananmen protests. Now 41 and living in Taipei, he has been told that China will never grant him amnesty.

He last saw his parents shortly before he was smuggled out of Beijing after the students' movement had been crushed by tanks and machine guns on June 3 and 4, but can communicate with them relatively unhindered via the internet.

"Living as an exile is tormenting and impossible for anyone who has not experienced it to understand," he said. "At first, I felt hatred for the regime, but that soon passed as hatred can bring no good. But the anger is there every day."

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on China to account for those killed in the Tiananmen Square protests.

"A China that has made enormous progress economically, and that is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership, should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing," she said.

TELEGRAPH, NEW YORK TIMES

READ MORE---> Tiananmen dissident rebuffed...

Still no faith in the death toll 20 years on

Show of force...Chinese paramilitary police in uniform and plain clothes
marched past the public after a flag-raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square yesterday.
Photo: Reuters

(SMH) - John Garnaut Herald Correspondent in Beijing

THE Chinese Communist Party left nothing to chance for the 20th anniversary of the June 4 massacre yesterday, packing Tiananmen Square with hundreds, or thousands, of security men.

At noon tourists in and around the square were outnumbered by blue-uniformed police and armed police in green uniforms.

The blue and green security forces were vastly outnumbered by young officers in plain clothes who loitered every five or 10 metres across the vast square and nearby public spaces.

Each plain-clothes officer was identifiable by a light-blue sun umbrella and a small imitation-brass badge with the red flag of China, just like the ones found at Chinese flea markets.

Those sporting larger badges on their chests had relatively large physiques and appeared to be connected to the armed police as they mingled with and supplied water to their uniformed comrades.

One red-badged young man rolled up his umbrella and held it against his armpit, as if it were a gun, before refocusing and resuming his tourist guise.

Eighteen municipal government mini vans lined up on the east side of the Monument to the People's Heroes, pot-bellied officials sprawling inside the air-conditioned vans as plain-clothes men complained of the heat out.

Some genuine tourists were annoyed by the security turnout.

"Are you serious? You want me to open my shirt? Do you think I'm carrying dynamite?" an elderly Chinese woman asked as she went through an X-ray machine at one of the security screening gates to the square.

"Why are there so many police?" a male visitor asked.

"Today there are foreigners coming," came the reply.

Some are no doubt drawn to the square by historical curiosity or respect for friends and countrymen slaughtered here 20 years ago by the People's Liberation Army. Others, particularly those from out of town, are unaware of the crackdown that changed the course of history.

Yesterday was not the time to distinguish who was who.

"Yeah, I've heard of it, but I'm really not too clear about it," said one young visitor from Inner Mongolia, who gave his family name as Dong. "The square has changed a lot," he said, as a red-badged man shuffled into listening distance.

In Washington leaders of the Tiananmen Square uprising - including Wang Dan, the student leader who was expelled from China in 1998 - were joined by US leaders in demanding that China account for its bloody crackdown.

The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. said: "A China that has made enormous progress economically and is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership should examine openly the darker events of its past." She called on China to state for the first time how many were killed, detained or remain missing "to learn and to heal".

Last night tens of thousands were expected at the annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong that has become a touchstone for the movement for democracy in China and the campaign to overturn Beijing's official verdict, which condemned the 1989 demonstrations.

with agencies

READ MORE---> Still no faith in the death toll 20 years on...

China blocks any commemoration of Tiananmen crackdown

Members of the public watch the flag raising ceremony
in Tiananmen Square. Photo: Reuters

(SMH) -China blanketed Tiananmen Square with police and security forces on Thursday, blocking any attempt to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the deadly crackdown on mass democracy protests.

The government again defended the decision to put down the demonstrations, which left hundreds and perhaps thousands dead, and firmly dismissed a US demand for a public accounting of the events of June 3-4, 1989.

Tens of thousands of people crowded a park late on Thursday in semi-autonomous Hong Kong for the only major commemoration of the anniversary on Chinese soil. Thousands more were expected to attend events in other cities around the world.

Hundreds of police and security forces were deployed throughout the day in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, where protesters rallied for weeks in 1989 for democratic reform before the army's deadly intervention.

Police officers searched bags and even the pockets of thousands of Chinese and foreign tourists streaming through checkpoints to visit the giant plaza in the Chinese capital, and foreign journalists were barred from entering.

"There are far more police than normal days," said a 35-year-old Chinese man, who said he frequently visits the square. "It's because of June 4. It's pretty scary having so much police. There are a lot of plainclothes officers, too."

China has for days worked to prevent any public discussion or remembrance of the events by blocking access to social networking websites like Twitter, blacking out some foreign news reports and hiding away key dissidents.

An AFP TV journalist was ordered by police to delete footage from his camera, and local tourists near the square were reluctant to discuss the crackdown -- a subject that remains taboo.

In Hong Kong, Victoria Park was illuminated by tens of thousands of candles lit in remembrance of the victims. Organisers said 150,000 attended the vigil, while police put the figure at 62,800.

"I'm deeply moved, it was proof that Hong Kong people still preserve their conscience," said Debby Chan, aged 28, a campaigner on behalf of mothers of the victims of the crackdown.

"This rally will tell the world... that we still remember the Tiananmen Square democracy movement," Xiong Yan, a student leader of the 1989 protests who was surprisingly let into Hong Kong on Saturday, told AFP.

But the government in Beijing dismissed calls for a review of the crackdown and expressed "strong dissatisfaction" with US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's demand for an account of the dead and missing.

"On the political incident that took place in the 1980s, the party and the government have already reached a conclusion," foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.

Clinton had called on Beijing to publish victim's names, saying it would help China "learn and heal".

From his home in exile in India, Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama also called for a review of the bloodshed and urged Beijing's leadership to "pursue a policy of greater accommodation and tolerance of diverse views".

The events that unfolded in Tiananmen Square in 1989 played out on television screens around the world and temporarily made Beijing a pariah in the West.

Twenty years on, the government's authority at home is intact and its global clout is greater than ever, thanks mainly to its ranking as the world's third-biggest economy.

But activists have continued to press the government to address the crackdown.

"The Communist Party has to acknowledge the crimes that it committed," Qi Zhiyong, 53, who lost a leg in June 1989, told AFP ahead of the anniversary, before being ordered out of sight.

Dai Qing, a prominent Beijing-based critic of the government who spent time in jail after the crackdown, said she was heeding a call by dissidents to wear the traditional colour of mourning in a tribute to those killed on June 3-4.

"I'm wearing white," she told AFP.

"The use of this kind of violence on June 4 may make you think this is a powerful government, but it did not bring happiness to people."

In Poland, German chancellor Angela Merkel paid homage to the Tiananmen protesters in a speech marking the 20th anniversary of a landmark election there that hastened the demise of communism across Europe.

"It's a good day to remember that June 4, 1989 also marked a great sacrifice on Tiananmen Square. This should encourage us to support all those in the world who are seeking freedom," Merkel said.

READ MORE---> China blocks any commemoration of Tiananmen crackdown...

Beijing moves into Tiananmen Square massacre lockdown

Michael Sainsbury,
The Australian

CHINA's Communist Party has mobilised every arm of its massive state apparatus to ensure the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on its citizens in Tiananmen Square passes unnoticed.

Authorities censored a host of online services yesterday, launched armed patrols around the centre of Beijing and placed prominent dissidents under arrest.

Thousands of chat rooms and major offshore internet sites such as Hotmail, Twitter and Flickr have been blocked, joining an existing three-month ban on Google's video site, YouTube, which was punished for showing Chinese soldiers beating Tibetan monks.

Foreign journalists have been blocked from interviewing people around the square and had members of their local staff questioned this week, despite promises of freer access for reporters by the Government following last year's Olympic Games.

On the evening of June 3, 1989, China's leadership moved to impose martial law on the centre of Beijing after almost seven weeks of protests begun by students, culminating in the peaceful occupation of Tiananmen Square outside the Forbidden City. Thousands of troops and tanks stormed the city streets and the square, crushing and shooting unarmed citizens.

Since then, the event has been wiped from Chinese history books with most young Chinese having only vague knowledge of the massacre and many happy to dismiss it as history.

"I know it was bad but most people really don't know, and the Government has done plenty of good things since then, " said one 26-year-old Beijinger whose view is typical of the age group.

But the Chinese Government continues its refusal to recognise the event, name and count its victims or conduct any form of inquiry or reconciliation. Its paranoia about the massacre reaches its peak in the weeks ahead of the anniversary each year.

Authorities have been steadily tightening surveillance over China's dissident community ahead of this year's anniversary, with some leading writers under house arrest for months.

The city's stubborn coterie of human rights lawyers have been subject to worse than usual harrassment in the lead-up to the annual June 1 renewal of their licences.

But while the Government and its agencies are obsessing over events of two decades ago, ordinary Chinese people are more concerned over a murder that has become the latest cause celebre.

Deng Yujiao, a waitress from central China's Hubei province, stabbed a senior government official to death after being sexually harassed. The Government has shut down access to the town by reporters and blocked websites discussing the case.

More than 40 lawyers across the country have formed a volunteer group to help Ms Deng, who is being held under house arrest.

Last week, a seminar organised by a law website on self-defence, discussing the Deng case, was aborted after government intervention and the owner of another website with similar intentions was repatriated from Beijing to Shanxi province. More than 26,000 chat groups discussing the murder were shut down by the Government.

China has the world's largest online population, and internet communities have proven increasingly influential in spreading word of everything from student protests to group shopping excursions.

Additional reporting: AP

READ MORE---> Beijing moves into Tiananmen Square massacre lockdown...

Communist crackdown on Tiananmen protests

By Michael Sainbury

(News.com-The Australian) - CHINA'S Communist Party has mobilised every arm of its massive state apparatus to ensure the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on its citizens in Tiananmen Square passes unnoticed.

Authorities censored a host of online services yesterday, launched armed patrols around the centre of Beijing and placed prominent dissidents under arrest, The Australian reports.

Thousands of chat rooms and major offshore internet sites such as Hotmail, Twitter and Flickr have been blocked, joining an existing three-month ban on Google's video site, YouTube, which was punished for showing Chinese soldiers beating Tibetan monks.

Foreign journalists have been blocked from interviewing people around the square and had members of their local staff questioned this week, despite promises of freer access for reporters by the Government following last year's Olympic Games.

On the evening of June 3, 1989, China's leadership moved to impose martial law on the centre of Beijing after almost seven weeks of protests begun by students, culminating in the peaceful occupation of Tiananmen Square outside the Forbidden City.

Thousands of troops and tanks stormed the city streets and the square, crushing and shooting unarmed citizens.

Since then, the event has been wiped from Chinese history books with most young Chinese having only vague knowledge of the massacre and many happy to dismiss it as history.

"I know it was bad but most people really don't know, and the Government has done plenty of good things since then, " said one 26-year-old Beijinger whose view is typical of the age group.

But the Chinese Government continues its refusal to recognise the event, name and count its victims or conduct any form of inquiry or reconciliation. Its paranoia about the massacre reaches its peak in the weeks ahead of the anniversary each year.

Authorities have been steadily tightening surveillance over China's dissident community ahead of this year's anniversary, with some leading writers under house arrest for months.

The city's stubborn coterie of human rights lawyers have been subject to worse than usual harrassment in the lead-up to the annual June 1 renewal of their licences.

Read more on this story at The Australian.

READ MORE---> Communist crackdown on Tiananmen protests...

Forget Tiananmen, Welcome Confucius

By ANTOANETA BEZLOVA /IPS WRITER
The Irrawaddy News

BEIJING — Tiananmen Square is history. Or at least that is the belief shared by many on the campus of China’s top university. Students at the distinguished Beijing University, or Beida—once a hotbed of political activism and now at the forefront of China’s attempts to project soft power around the world—no longer commemorate June 4, 1989, when the Communist Party ordered a military assault on thousands of unarmed students protesting for democracy at Tiananmen Square.

A Chinese paramilitary policeman keeps watch on
Tiananmen Square in Beijing. (Photo: AFP)

In the early 1990s, clandestine candle vigils were held on that date on the banks of Beida’s No Name Lake. Small groups of students would form circles holding candles and talking about the Beijing Spring of 1989 and its quest for democracy. Hidden in the dark, these gatherings would last for an hour or so before being dispersed by university security.

On summer nights in the lead-up to the anniversary, some students would play a dangerous game of hide-and-seek with the guards, throwing bottles out of their dormitory windows—a symbolic gesture of protest against the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s decision to call out tanks against unarmed civilians in Tiananmen Square. (Xiaoping is a homonym for ‘bottle’ in Chinese.)

After all, Beida is where the trouble for the Communist leadership started in 1989—with a few political posters and student meetings swelling to protest marches to Tiananmen Square, and continuing all through the spring with peaceful sit-ins in the square, and hunger strikes to bolster demands for political reform.

On a recent day in late May, this writer—a student herself at Beijing University in those years—retraced the sites of stealthy student gatherings and audacious small acts of defiance, but found neither. Beida’s youth still crowded the benches and grass around the serenely beautiful No Name Lake, but the conversations were not about commemorating what happened 20 years ago.

Buoyed by China’s sustained economic boom, which offers opportunities unthinkable to their parents and grandparents, Beida’s students tend to believe today that China is destined to blaze a path different than the one chartered by the 1989 student leaders.

"In 1989 they (students) all believed in Western democracy. That is why they even had the Statue of Liberty on Tiananmen Square," a philosophy student surnamed Zheng told IPS. "But I think China should follow its own path of development in politics as well as economy, and not be a copycat of the West. We have done that long enough."

Such confidence is partly fueled by China’s authoritarian government’s success in delivering material goods to its people. But there are other layers too: disillusionment with the Western model of liberal capitalism during this time of global financial crisis, and newfound pride in the country’s traditional culture that is feeding a revival of the Confucian political and moral ethos.

While few of the Beida students who talked to IPS openly vindicate the bloodshed that occurred in the early hours of June 4, 1989, nearly all of them said the crackdown was necessary to prevent China from veering dangerously off its chosen path.

"There would have been chaos, and our economic development would have suffered," said another student, Lan Pingli. "But we need many years of peace, stability and economic prosperity to be able to find our own Chinese way of political governance."

If Lan sounds uncannily like a Communist propaganda apparatchik, it is because she and many others among her peers believe Beijing’s form of authoritarian governance combined with a market economy is the right formula for the world’s most populous country. They subscribe to the idea that political change will come to China not by following the western model of parliamentarian democracy, but China’s own practices.

The Communist Party, which has long regarded Confucius as a feudal thinker, has made a flip-flop, tacitly approving a state comeback for Confucianism, and even promoting it as a key aspect of an alternative political model for China.

"Confucianism has quietly come back," says Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong, "and the Communist leadership has been exploiting it to help fill the ideological vacuum and improve morality. It is a low-key revival, but it suits their needs to find a new cohesive force at a time when Marxism is dead but democracy is absent."

China watchers say President Hu Jintao believes this country’s rampant consumerism has left an ethical vacuum that could be filled by a return to the Confucian values of honor and decency. In a recent lecture titled 'The Socialist Concept of Honour and Disgrace,' he extolled Confucius’s "eight virtues," such as plain living and public service, and warned of his "eight disgraces," like pursuit of profit.

Some experts say the revival of Confucianism has broadened China’s political spectrum and could in the long-run serve as a basis for a new model of governance.

"What is interesting is that now there are more options on the table than compared with the 1980s, when political evolution was viewed only as a change from an authoritarian to a democratic form of government," says political theorist Daniel Bell, author of a book on China’s new Confucianism. "In China at the moment, the spirit of experimentation is prevailing."

Yet many believe that China’s political options have actually narrowed since the late 1980s, when the Communist Party crushed the pro-democracy protests.

"I don’t see any serious initiative on the part of the Communist leadership to change the current political model," says Joseph Cheng. "In fact, since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, party leaders have shown less and less readiness to compromise on their monopoly on power."

Others say dressing its power in Confucian robes cannot help the Communist Party avoid accountability for the killings of untold numbers of unarmed civilians.

"Confucianism is against killing," says writer and social critic Yu Jie. "You cannot justify a crackdown like Tiananmen on the grounds that you were trying to keep the country on its own track."

The Communist Party has dismissed international condemnation of the violent crackdown and rebuffed all efforts to seek a re-examination of the events of June 1989. Beijing continues to defend the use of lethal force against its own citizens as a measure necessary for the stability and development of the country.

Estimates of the death toll vary widely, from a few hundred to a few thousand.

READ MORE---> Forget Tiananmen, Welcome Confucius...

China Dissident Held ahead of Protest Anniversary - Wu Gaoxing

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN / AP WRITER
The Irrawaddy News

BEIJING — A former Chinese political prisoner has been detained just days before the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, a human rights group said Tuesday.

Wu Gaoxing, a former educator in his late 60s, was detained Saturday at his home in the eastern city of Taizhou, shortly after the publication of a letter he had co-signed complaining about economic discrimination against dissidents, the New York-based Human Rights in China said in a news release.

The letter, addressed to President Hu Jintao and other top communist leaders, said former political prisoners are unable to find steady jobs and are deprived of medical benefits and pensions.

"If we get sick, we can only wait to die, and all this just because 20 years ago we were sentenced for political reasons," said the letter. The human rights group published the letter online at Wu's request, and an English translation was posted on the group's Web site.

Calls to Wu's mobile phone were met with a message saying it had been turned off, while phones at Taizhou State Security Bureau rang unanswered.

Authorities have tightened surveillance over China's dissident community ahead of Thursday's anniversary of the military's crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests, in which possibly thousands of students, activists and ordinary citizens were killed.

The government has never allowed an independent investigation nor offered a full accounting of its actions, and the crackdown itself remains a taboo subject in Chinese society.

Wu was among hundreds detained or imprisoned in the crackdown and was given a two-year sentence for having organized support for the protesters.

Overseas monitoring groups estimate that 30 men remain in prison on charges relating to the protests.

The prisoners—then mostly young workers at the time—were jailed for burning army trucks, stealing equipment or attacking soldiers as the military advanced toward student-led protesters on Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.

READ MORE---> China Dissident Held ahead of Protest Anniversary - Wu Gaoxing...

Tiananmen: A Battle of Remembering vs. Forgetting

By CHARLES HUTZLER / AP WRITER
The Irrawaddy News

BEIJING — As a young poet, Cui Weiping was not much interested in politics. But she says she could never shake the image of her husband returning home on a June night 20 years ago, his pants mottled with the blood of people shot by the Chinese army.

Now Cui is speaking out, trying to rescue the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement and its violent end from a powerful government heavily invested in suppressing their very mention.

Thousands of people take part in a demonstration on the streets of Hong Kong on May 31, 2009 in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of Beijing's crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. (Photo: Getty Images)

With the approach Thursday of the 20th anniversary of "six-four," Chinese shorthand for the June 4 crackdown date, this Beijing Film Academy professor feels a duty to remember.

"Opening fire was not our responsibility these 20 years. But not talking about six-four has been our responsibility these 20 years," said Cui, a slight, soft-spoken woman with a pixie-ish haircut.

In mid-May, 53-year-old Cui gave a speech on the duty to speak out to small gathering of like-minded liberals. She posted her comments — "Are we intending to continue this silence?" — on her blog. They were excised by censors from the Chinese site but then reposted by others and removed again repeatedly.

Two decades on, the events in the heart of the Chinese capital and elsewhere remain an essential issue for some Chinese even as the authoritarian government has largely succeeded in turning it into a non-issue for many, using stunning economic growth, sophisticated propaganda and repression to stifle public discussion.

The struggle matters because as China becomes economically and diplomatically stronger, its leaders and supporters point to their system as a model, an alternative to the capitalist, democratic West teetering in financial crisis. Gleaming rebuilt cities like Shanghai and the grand, flawless Beijing Olympics are what the Chinese leadership wants to be associated with, not the crackdown. Tiananmen Square has been remodeled too, with patches of grass to make it look less cold and forbidding.

This file photo taken on June 2, 1989 shows hundreds of thousands of Chinese gathering around a 10-metre replica of the Statue of Liberty (C), called the Goddess of Democracy, in Tiananmen Square demanding democracy despite martial law in Beijing. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of protesters were killed by China's military on June 3 and 4, 1989, as communist leaders ordered an end to six weeks of unprecedented democracy protests in the heart of the Chinese capital. Dissidents and human rights advocates around the world will mark on June 4, 2009 the twentieth anniversary of China's bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy protests. (Photo: Getty Images)

The trouble is, the memories keep percolating. "Eighty-nine is like a dead rat in the Chinese political system. It's getting stinkier by the day," said Anne-Marie Brady, a Chinese politics expert at New Zealand's University of Canterbury. "It has to be dealt with at some point."

The Tiananmen movement rose from a ferment of reform bubbling through China and the Soviet Bloc. When a popular reformist leader died, students in Beijing marched to Tiananmen to demand change, later occupying the square for weeks and drawing as many as a million people. People from other parts of China joined them, thronging around a makeshift statue of liberty. After hard-liners reasserted themselves, the military assault came, killing hundreds. In one iconic moment of resistance, a lone man holding shopping bags stood in front of a column of tanks.

Though they rarely talk about it, people in their 30s and older in Beijing and elsewhere remember the demonstrations and the months of martial law.

An advertisement circulated on the Internet in March for T-shirts marked with the dates of the crackdown in Roman numerals — VIIIIXVIIV for '89 6-4 — until being expunged. Last July, the plucky Beijing News tabloid ran two pages of photographs of China in the 1980s, one of them of a black-and-white Associated Press image titled "The Wounded" showing young men in bloodstained shirts on the back of a three-wheeled cart. No caption explained the context, but many knew the photo was from the crackdown. The government removed the spread from the Internet and ordered the paper recalled from newsstands.

Stunned by the protests and communism's collapse in Eastern Europe, Beijing opened a multi-front campaign to keep the Communist Party in power. Free market reforms were unleashed, raising living standards. The propaganda departments that supervise all media were reinvigorated. They adapted the flashy techniques of modern Western advertising and Hollywood entertainment and tamed the Internet. A new nationalistic message was peddled: that the party remained a bulwark against a hostile U.S. intent on thwarting China's rise to greatness.

Above all, the leadership set about reforming the party. Its elite think tanks studied the lessons of communism's fall elsewhere. The party opened its doors to entrepreneurs, thus co-opting a potential source of opposition. It restructured and retrained the bureaucracy to make government responsive to people's needs, if not open and democratic. Tax revenues swollen by the expanding economy provided means to buy off redundant factory workers and poor farmers left behind in the boom.

"Any ruling party, no matter how mighty its power, how senior its qualifications, how long its rein, if it's stuck in a rut, standing still and not making progress, conservative and rigid and not thinking about forging ahead, then its creativity will fail and its vital energy stop." Vice President Xi Jinping said reiterating this message to senior officials at the Central Party School last September.

Imposing a silence over Tiananmen and the arrest and harassment of political critics are blunter tools in this strategy. To Cui, the poet, the taboo is a humiliation the leadership uses to make people complicit in preserving the party's political monopoly.

"To allow such a hole to exist in our lives has made our ethics blurry and problematic," she said in addressing the May 10 gathering of academics and activists at a hotel function room in Beijing's Western Hills.

Cui was at home the night of the crackdown; her husband, like many in the city, had stayed on the streets. For years, Cui said, depression clouded her memories of the event. Translating into Chinese the book "Open Letters" by Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and post-communist president of Czechoslovakia, helped her recover her memories and voice. Her blog, hosted on China's biggest Internet portal, often features pointed social commentary. Government censorship is a frequent target.

Cui believes that the crackdown remains a sore point for many Chinese, including younger Chinese who are supposed to be apolitical. Friends pass around pirated DVDs of "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," a 1995 documentary about the Tiananmen movement. Some bulletin board sites host furtive discussions about what to wear to commemorate the anniversary. Some are suggesting white, the traditional color of mourning.

Online, however, Cui said a different idea has been voiced for what to wear this June 4. "Some say we ought to wear a white shirt and blue trousers just like tank man," Cui said.

READ MORE---> Tiananmen: A Battle of Remembering vs. Forgetting...

Thousands march in Hong Kong to mark Tiananmen crackdown

(SMH) -Thousands of protesters marched through Hong Kong on Sunday to commemorate the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing 20 years ago, including one of the leaders from Tiananmen Square.

Organisers said around 5000 people rallied through the streets of the city to mark the anniversary of the military crackdown, which left hundreds, possibly thousands dead following weeks of protests in the capital.

Among the marchers was Xiong Yan, a leading student protester during the 1989 demonstrations who now lives in exile in the United States.

He was surprisingly allowed into Hong Kong on Saturday.

Lee Cheuk-yan, a pro-democracy legislator in Hong Kong and one of the organisers of the annual march, said it was crucial that the city continued to mark the events of 20 years ago.

"We are the only place on Chinese soil that can commemorate June 4," he told AFP.

"Hong Kong has become the conscience of China to remember ... the crime of the Tiananmen Square massacre and push the regime (in Beijing) to admit their mistakes."

The attendance at the march was sharply up on last year's figures. An annual candlelit vigil on Thursday is expected to attract tens of thousands.

Xiong, who was put on a list of the authorities' 21 "most-wanted" student protesters after the occupation of Tiananmen was broken up, spent two years in jail before being smuggled to the US via Hong Kong.

His entry was unexpected because of China's sensitive attitude to any criticism of the crackdown. Other 1989 campaigners have been refused entry in the past.

"I was very surprised as I have tried many, many times to come," said Xiong, who arrived on Saturday night, the first time he had set foot on Chinese soil in 17 years.

"I hope in the future I can not only go to Hong Kong, but also to Beijing," he added.

The marchers gathered in the city's Victoria Park, waving banners with slogans such as "Pass the torch on, relay the message of democracy to those who come after us" and "Speak the truth, never forget".

The rally included a small group of mainland Chinese students, who wore T-shirts citing former Communist leader Mao Zedong: "Whoever suppresses student movements is going to have a bad ending."

"I am very excited to see so many people, as this is forbidden on the mainland," said one of the students, 20, who did not want to be named.

"(It shows) there is hope," he added.

Meanwhile, a Danish sculptor who flew to Hong Kong to protest the bloody crackdown was refused entry.

Jens Galschiot, whose sculpture commemorating those who died in the 1989 military crackdown, Pillar of Shame, is displayed at Hong Kong University, was stopped by officials Saturday and sent back to Zurich, an immigration spokesman confirmed.

Albert Ho, chairman of the Democratic Party and a lawyer, said the Dane was detained for five hours before being put on a flight to Zurich late on Saturday. Ho said he was looking at possible legal action over the decision.

Hong Kong has a different legal system from the mainland, including the right to protest.

READ MORE---> Thousands march in Hong Kong to mark Tiananmen crackdown...

Tiananmen Square's Seven weeks that shook the world

Symbol of protest ... the famous white-shirted man,
briefcase in hand, stares down an advancing tank
on Beijing's Chang An Avenue,
the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Photo: AP/Jeff Widener

Twenty years on from Tiananmen Square, John Garnaut argues there are glimpses of recognition of the sins of the past.

(SMH) -Few who were old enough to watch the news in 1989 will forget the television footage of the white-shirted man, shoulders slumped, briefcase in hand, staring down an advancing tank on Beijing's Chang An Avenue - the Avenue of Eternal Peace.

He became the global symbol of the Chinese protesters who bravely massed for seven weeks in Tiananmen Square to demand inclusive and clean government. But 20 years on, the world still does not know his name or whether he survived after slipping back into the crowd.

Nor do we know how many hundreds of students, workers and bystanders were ripped apart by bayonets and machine-gun fire, or smeared into the bitumen beneath the tank tracks on the approaches to the square late in the evening of June 3 and through Beijing's streets over the following days.

"Corpses littered Beijing's main boulevard, Chang An, with blood and torn limbs visible in several sections of the area outside the Forbidden City," reported the Herald's correspondent in Beijing, Peter Ellingsen. "One student as he lay dying scrawled in blood: 'Li Peng, you will never live in peace'."

But the outside world's fragmentary knowledge of the Tiananmen tragedy is vastly greater than what is generally known inside China. The Chinese Communist Party has controlled nothing so tightly as this black chapter in its history.

On the evening of June 3 - the eve of the massacre - loudspeakers in the square were embellishing the official record before the tanks even arrived: "A serious counter-revolutionary riot has broken out in Beijing. Thugs have stolen the army's ammunition and set fire to army trucks.

"Their aim is to destroy the People's Republic of China."

China was saturated in propaganda before the blood was dry. Mr White-shirt, they said, was a "lone scoundrel" whose asserted survival "proves that our soldiers exercised the highest degree of restraint".

On June 9 Deng Xiaoping called together his generals and signalled a massive rebuilding of party indoctrination in every institution: "In the last 10 years our biggest mistake was made in the field of education, primarily in ideological and political education."

The Communist Party rebuilt its propaganda apparatus, re-educated and re-vetted millions of officials and extended its reach into every realm of public communication. Loyalty to the party once again became the primary criterion for getting ahead.

The party did not spare its own. Zhao Ziyang, then Communist Party chief and architect of China's economic reforms, had broken the unwritten rule by refusing to sign up to the official story. He was accused of "splitting the party" and "supporting turmoil", and spent the rest of his life under house arrest until his death in 2005.

Officials soon found that voicing support for the crackdown was the fastest path to promotion. Parents learned to grieve in private for missing children. Traumatised students were force-fed a deluge of "patriotic education" - a project boosted yet again this year - after indoctrination lapsed in the more liberal mid-1980s. And those who could not be trusted to forget the Communist Party's blackest hour were imprisoned or banished overseas.

"I'm a dissident in exile," the Tiananmen student leader Wuer Kaixi says from Taiwan, where he manages an investment fund.

"I can't come back, I'm still on the most-wanted list."

Bullet holes along Chang An Avenue have long been covered over, paving stones mauled by tanks quickly replaced. The party has airbrushed all trace of the Tiananmen massacre from every public space. Internet screening has been redoubled as Thursday's anniversary draws near.

The party acts as if it would not survive even a gesture of public protest, let alone honest appraisal of how it gunned down its own at its most sacred place.

The strategy is working. "People don't really talk about June 4 any more," a confident public security official told the Herald. "We're far more worried about September, when university students graduate and find there aren't any jobs."

The party's obsession with manipulating its past makes the achievements of a few contrarian cadres all the more unlikely.

Du Daozheng joined the Communist Party in 1937, aged 14. He proudly rose through the ranks of a revolutionary party that fought back the Japanese, proclaimed the People's Republic and distributed land to peasants. He stuck with it as China took its Great Leap Forward, starving 30 million people to death, and as the Cultural Revolution killed countless others. Du was persecuted as a rightist when he ran a '50s regional office of the Xinhua news agency. Zhao Ziyang was the young deputy party secretary who stood by and let it happen; there are no untarnished heroes.

"I was quite blind in the past," says Du. "I have been persecuted by many, and I have persecuted many."

In the '80s, Du edited The People's Daily before heading the General Administration of Press and Publications. Then, on May 31, 1989, as tanks rumbled towards Beijing, Du says he shed many tears before phoning a senior leader and vowing to tear up his party membership card if soldiers opened fire.

But Du did not quit membership. He has spent 20 years chipping away from inside at the party's collective guilt, trying to clear the names of the reform-minded cadres it had destroyed. In the early '90s, Du and other liberals founded the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, which became China's only historically inquisitive political publication.

We visited Du late last year in his shambolic Beijing office after his magazine broke China's greatest media taboo by slipping into publication the name of the purged Zhao. From under his desk he pulled a book he had secretly published in Hong Kong.

It contains 700 mini-articles about the complex legacies of Tiananmen and has the banned date "June 4" on the cover. It reminisces about the party's fallen heroes, attacks the cancerous corruption and misrule guaranteed when officials are hired on ability to lie, and laments the party's inability to learn from the Cultural Revolution. The introduction reveals the articles were written for the Hong Kong press by Du and other senior cadres over the past 20 years, under the pen name Hai Ci. Countless Chinese have been jailed for doing much less. Some articles describe small details of Zhao's life under house arrest. It laments that in Beijing "if you supported the shooting you get promoted, regardless of performance".

The book no longer is secret. Nor is the introduction Du wrote for Zhao's extraordinary memoirs, published in English last week. The introduction details how Du persuaded Zhao of his duty to record his version of history. It says he and four other officials secretly recorded Zhao's testimony and smuggled it to Hong Kong for publication.

Du writes Zhao Zihang back into Communist Party history as a talented but not flawless man who became a hero for standing up for the truth: "At the critical historical moment of June 4 Zhao accepted his responsibility to the Chinese nation, history, and ordinary people. He set aside personal life and honour, took the side of truth and the people, and made no compromise, surrender, or concession. The fundamental cause of Zhao Ziyang's fall is that China lagged behind in political reform."

Zhao's invaluable memoirs make clear the Tiananmen protests were manipulated by ambitious hardliners, led by Li Peng, who sabotaged for personal gain opportunities for compromise. Ten times China's propaganda authorities tried to nobble Du's magazine and each time he has prevailed. On Saturday the magazine website was shut down but it was up again by lunchtime on Monday.

The server company was ticked off by a senior official and apologised to Du for its "mistake", even though the magazine carries an article penned by Chen Ziming, an exile who features on the Government's June 4 most-wanted list.

Du and his magazine are protected from on high. For the first time, the Communist Party has sanctioned a small but vibrant space where it can confront its turbulent past.

History also confronts the democracy leaders who occupied the square in 1989. Up close, they were also divided, confused and ill-equipped for real politics.

Hardliners on both sides rejected chances for compromise and thought their causes were helped by bloodshed. Said the most prominent democracy leader, Chai Ling: "Only when the square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes." He saw his duty as protest commander-in-chief to hold on to power "because I must resist compromise, resist these traitors".

Wuer, a moderate student leader who failed to convince peers to leave the square, says Chai has been unfairly criticised. "We were young; we were 20 years old at the time. It was stressful and emotional and I'm sure I said things that I would regret."

Wang Juntao was released from jail in 1994 and sent to the United States at the request of Bill Clinton. He now sees he overestimated the global democracy tide and underestimated the Communist Party's determination to cling to power. He argues the party gutted the country to restore itself.

"Corruption, inequality, injustice, collapse of morality and the social environment - those problems caused the '89 democracy movement but they are all much worse now," says Wang.

Many of the party's inside critics, including Du, would not disagree.

Zhao came to regret being too conservative when in power. He came to believe political reform was China's only way forward.

Wuer, the exiled activist, says each day he wakes to competing sensations of anger, survivor's guilt, hope and nostalgic yearning.

"Friends tell me it is no longer the same Beijing I miss," says Wuer.

History's verdict is far from settled. At least its writing has begun.

John Garnaut is the Herald's China correspondent.

READ MORE---> Tiananmen Square's Seven weeks that shook the world...