Chinese citizens who lost relatives in the 1989 Tiananmen massacre were preparing low-key ceremonies for Sunday's 17th anniversary of the crackdown, under the watchful eye of the police.
BEIJING: Chinese citizens who lost relatives in the 1989 Tiananmen massacre were preparing low-key ceremonies for Sunday's 17th anniversary of the crackdown, under the watchful eye of the police.
Zhang Xueling, a Beijing woman whose son was shot dead by the army on June 4, 1989, and would now have been 36, planned to go to the Wan'an Cemetery in the west of the capital.
"Every year on June 4, relatives of the victims gather together at the cemetery," she told AFP by telephone.
"We all feel very sad and try to comfort each other. Of course, the police are always there."
She said police behavior at the cemetery has become more brazen in recent years, as plain-clothes officers had been replaced with officers in full uniform, often openly filming the memorial ceremonies.
Outside Beijing, quiet ceremonies were also being prepared by people refusing to forget. One of them was Lin Mu, the former secretary of 1980s reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang.
"I don't have special activities planned outside, but I do intend to hold a memorial ceremony at home," said Lin, now a prominent dissident voice, talking to AFP by phone from his home in the city of Xi'an in China's northwest.
He said that for him, the injustice of 1989 reverberated in today's modernizing Chinese society. "Apart from June 4, there are a lot of other problems in China, like human rights," he said.
"There are a lot of rights infringement cases in China. The government says it is pursuing a 'people first policy,' but it's just talk, and it's not really followed up by any action."
Hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters and citizens were gunned down in the streets of Beijing when the People's Liberation Army moved in to quell six weeks of democracy protests in 1989.
The government has insisted to this day that the response to quell what it called "the counter-revolutionary rebellion" paved the way for 17 years of robust economic growth.
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