Tiananmen Plus 18

"Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy."
-The Rolling Stones; "Street Fighting Man"

Today marks the 18th anniversary of the Chinese government's crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Although it was the culmination of a series of events and protests that had been building for weeks, it is most remembered for the events of this day, when the People's Liberation Army took the gloves off and shut down the protests.

What everyone remembers happened the next day, June 5, as the extent of the military's crackdown was becoming clear to reporters and people on the ground. A lone, still unidentified protester ran in front of a column of tanks as they were driving down the street and forced them to stop, as the cameras of international news organizations captured the extraordinary moment and soon transmitted the now iconic images throughout the world. A video of this, with Chinese subtitles and voiceover, can be seen here.

Contrary to popular belief, this did NOT happen in Tiananmen Square, it was on the Avenue of Eternal Peace and the tanks were LEAVING the square at the time this happened.

I went to help cover the annual candlelight vigil organized at Victoria Park every year and it was a pretty amazing thing to see. The park consists of 4 or 5 soccer fields next to each other, and the whole place is full with tens of thousands of people.

The only thing that comes to mind as a remote comparison to this are the annual vigils in Central Park in New York City on the anniversary of the death of John Lennon, although I doubt they draw anywhere near the size of crowds that this event does. [UPDATE: I should add a comparison to another annual event in NYC - the 9/11 anniversary vigil at Ground Zero.]

One of the most amazing things I heard and saw was this really depressing song (with lyrics in Cantonese or Mandarin, I couldn't tell) built around a piano melody that was somewhat similar to the one in Pink Floyd's "Nobody Home." After a few verses, they would stop singing the lyrics and read what I think were the names and ages of people who were killed at Tiananmen, while showing pictures of them on a giant projection screen as the music kept playing. Some of the photos were graphic -- a few showed pictures of the corpses in the morgue or the hospital.

The stunning thing about all this to me was the fact that the crowd was totally calm and peaceful. At some points where there was complete silence, you could have heard a pin drop in the park, never mind the fact that there were tens of thousands of people gathered there. That was radically different form the protests I've seen in Washington (i.e. anti-Iraq war, anti-abortion, etc.) where there is a bigger police presence and the crowds tend to be much more confrontational, at least in rhetoric or attitude, than the one I saw tonight.

I got the sense that the public mood was a little angrier than normal this year, because Ma Lik, the chairman of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) party in Hong Kong, made statements recently challenging the historical record of what did and didn't happen in Tiananmen Square in 1989. According to the Associated Press writeup of the comments, he said:

Ma, leader of one of Hong Kong's biggest political parties, told Hong Kong reporters on Tuesday that "gweilos," local slang for "foreigners," shouldn't be allowed to decide what really happened at Tiananmen, the South China Morning Post newspaper reported. Many of the event's accounts have come from foreign media.
"We should not say the Communist Party massacred people on June 4. I never said that nobody was killed, but it was not a massacre," the newspaper quoted Ma as saying during the briefing about political reform.
"A massacre would mean the Communist Party intentionally killed people with machine guns indiscriminately," Ma was quoted as saying.
Journalists covering the crackdown described tanks and troops armed with machine guns fighting their way into the city and suppressing the protests. Four days after the event, an announcer at the Beijing Radio station read a report that troops had killed thousands of people.
"The most tragic event happened in the Chinese capital, Beijing. Thousands of people, most of them innocent civilians, were killed by fully armed soldiers," the announcer said.
Ma also said he doubted accounts of tanks running over bodies and grinding up corpses like meat, the Post and Ming Pao Daily News reported.
...
Ma toned down his remarks Wednesday morning during an interview with government-run RTHK radio.
"What I meant is to look at the incident rationally. It happened a long time ago. I was not insulting those who lost their lives in Tiananmen Square to fight for democracy," he said.
But he added, "The description of the June 4 incident as a massacre and a river of blood, I think all these are not complete and correct views."

One of my friends here had to try and get a spokesperson or representative from DAB for an on-camera interview for a story on the anniversary that was commissioned by a client. In light of Ma's comments, I told her it would be virtually impossible to get somebody from DAB to talk, especially today and given the fact that their leader seriously stirred up a political and PR hornet's nest with his comments.

What follows are a series of photos I took from the vigil before it started and at the very beginning. Unfortunately for me, my camera ran out of battery shortly after it got dark and was not able to take any pictures from the last hour or so I was there.

Moral of the story? Charge your camera battery more frequently than once a week and always have a spare in case of emergencies.