China keeps tight grip on 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square

China's annual bout of state-enforced, collective amnesia went into overdrive yesterday on the 25th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on democracy demonstrators on Tiananmen Square and all around China on June 4th, 1989.

The mainstream media was extremely quiet about the event, not mentioning it, and social media were tightly muzzled for the day. Google was incredibly slow and Gmail often did not work at all.

The Beijing News daily had a story about the poor quality of toilet paper as its lead story – could this have been a cunning political comment? – while the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, had a story about president Xi Jinping visiting an engineering conference.

On this day 25 years ago, People’s Liberation Army tanks and troops rolled through the streets of the Chinese capital and other cities, picking off student and peasant demonstrators.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of people, were killed.

Early casualty figures from the Chinese Red Cross put the number of dead at 2,600, but the Chinese government says 241 died, yet no official investigation was ever carried out.

On Chang'an Avenue, People's Armed Police and other security officers are on duty, accompanied by armoured vehicles, while Tiananmen Square itself, a vast concourse overlooked by the portrait of founding father Chairman Mao Zedong on the Forbidden City, was largely sealed off by a heavy uniformed and plain-clothes security personnel.

Arrested

Among those arrested in the run-up were a group of intellectuals who gathered in Beijing to discuss the events of a quarter of a century ago.

Others, including Guo Jian, who was born in China but has an Australian passport, were picked up too. He angered authorities with his 2014 installation The Square, which is a model of Tiananmen Square covered in 350lbs of minced pork.

News reports on the BBC – which is only available in hotels and foreigner compounds anyway – are blocked out, leading to surreal black screens, and the sound is out of synch, so that the powers-that-be can pull the plug whenever they need to.

An opinion piece in the Global Times newspaper by a former London municipal official, John Ross, who now teaches at Renmin University, attacked the United States for being critical of China's human-rights record and urged the US House of Representatives to congratulate China for its unequalled contribution to human well-being in lifting over 600 million people out of poverty.

“China’s contribution to the real well-being of humanity is not only greater than the United States but is unmatched by any other country in the world,” Mr Ross wrote.

Lost hope

Another opinion piece in the print edition of the paper did not mention Tiananmen Square but did say “25 years on, society firmer about its path”.

In Hong Kong, which enjoys press freedom as part of the terms in which the territory was returned to China in 1997, there was wide-scale coverage of the anniversary. Around 180,000 people gathered in Victoria Park for a candlelit vigil to commemorate the event.

“There are different ways of looking at it, but the most important change to come out of the Tiananmen Square crackdown was that throughout the 1980s, the people had high hopes for the Communist Party, and that turned into a kind of despair,” said Fang Zheng, an athlete and student protester who was seriously injured during the crackdown when a tank ran over his legs. Both had to be amputated.

"I believe the majority of people lost hope in the Communist Party," he told the Front Line Defenders website.