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Monday, June 8, 2009 15:59 IST

On the night of June 4, I was at Hong Kong's Victoria Park for the annual candlelight vigil to remember the victims of the June 4, 1989 massacre in Beijing and keep alive the spirit of the Tiananmen Square student protestors. It was a profoundly moving experience, seeing some 150,000-plus people gathered (picture) for the 20^th anniversary of the massacre; countless more were milling around outside the park, unable to gain entry. It was, according to estimates, the largest June 4 gathering since 1989, and the only one that was held on Chinese territory this year. It was a compelling testament to the persistence of human memory - despite attempts by leaders in Beijing to blot out that bloody moment from people's consciousness.

(In contrast, see here, here, here and here the absurd lengths to which the "umbrella brigade" of the Chinese security apparatus went to block foreign TV news crews from filming on Tiananmen Square on June 4!)

As I stepped out of the Causeway Bay station on my way to the park, I ran into a streetside meeting addressed by Leung Kwok-hung (or 'Long Hair', as he's better known), a radical pro-democracy legislator in Hong Kong. On seeing me, 'Long Hair', who was speaking into a bullhorn, urged the gathering to give a round of applause in my honour "for supporting Hong Kong people" by turning up for the vigil. I then waded my way through the huge and growing crowd at the park, but still couldn't get anywhere near the centre of action.

By an amazing coincidence, in that crowd of 150,000-plus people, I ran into Effy Sun, a 23-year-old student from Beijing whom I had written about (here) in one of a series of articles I'd done for the Tiananmen anniversary: as a three-year-old growing up in Beijing, Effy had in 1989 been to the Tiananmen Square many times with her mother to watch the student protestors; her mum recalls Effy even chanting slogans raised by the students back then. Although Effy had told me (when I met her for the article) that she felt that Hong Kong people "were making too big a deal out of something that didn't matter today to most Chinese people", she gamely stayed until the end of the vigil ceremony. For a person from mainland China who is unaccustomed to seeing large, open expressions of dissent, particularly directed at the government, the sight of such a mammoth gathering raising pro-democracy slogans and articulating views that wouldn't be tolerated for a minute in mainland China must have been unnerving in some ways. But I guess it's important to occasionally step outside of our skins and see our countries as others might see it...

In putting together a package of articles on the 20^th anniversary of the Tiananmen movement (links below), I interviewed countless people, including student protestors who were in Tiananmen Square in 1989, labour union activists and human rights campaigners who were in the square on the night the tanks moved in, journalists (including an Indian journalist) who were eyewitnesses to history in 1989, political historians, 'China watchers', youngsters who grew up in China not knowing the truth about Tiananmen, and a post-1980s generation of youngsters in Hong Kong who are coming up with alternative ways of keeping the memory of the Tiananmen student protestors' ideals alive. Talking to them, revisiting their recollections, transcribing hours and hours of tapes and writing out the stories was for me an emotionally draining exercise. But I learnt much from the experience: in many ways, the Tiananmen movement of 1989 is a milestone in China's history, and - as a group of school children chant in Chinese director Zhang Yimou's endearing film The Road Home, it's important to "know the past" if you want to "know the present."

DNA articles on the 20^th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square movement.

1. Tiananmen Revisited: An overview of the events of June 3-4, 1989, from an international and domestic Chinese socioeconomic perspective.

2. 'Our fight for democracy continues': an interview with a 1989 student protestor, who now runs a multimillion dollar business in southern China and who still supports the underground movement for democracy in China.

3. 'I'm not sure we made a difference': an interview with Shen Tong, another 1989 student protestor who now runs a software company in the US, and who reckons that the student-led movement may have set China back politically.

4. An Indian eyewitness to history: the only Indian journalist who was in Beijing in May-June 1989 recalls what he saw of the historic movement.

5. 'Weakness exposed by Tiananmen still persists': an interview with Dr Andrew J. Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia University and co-editor of The Tiananmen Papers, an explosive book, based on leaked top-secret documents, that revealed the Chinese leadership's dilemmas and responses when confronted with the student-led movement in 1989.

6. Tiananmen and the New Age art of protesting: an account of how the post-1980s generation is keeping the memory of Tiananmen alive through art.

7. Modi and Tiananmen: my comment on the attempts by two tainted regimes - in China (over Tiananmen) and in Gujarat (over the 2002 riots) - to whitewash history by focussing on "economic development".

1 comments

Tiananmen may be a dark spot on China, but it doesn't bother me much because I see many such dark spots on India, like:

#1 More than 4,000 killed in the anti-Sikh riots. Any action taken on that?
#2 Almost 10,000 killed in the Bhopal gas disaster. What was done in that regard?
#3 Hundreds killed in the Mumbai riots. Did we get Dawood till date?
#4 Parliament was attacked. Did we punish those convicted?

These are just a few. I wonder how you compared Modi with China by ignoring all such things in the past as written above. Anyway, it's up to you. I prefer a man like Vladimir Putin for India.