Thousands in Hong Kong Commemorate Tiananmen

By TE-PING CHEN

HONG KONG—Thousands of people braved a heavy thunderstorm in Hong Kong's Victoria Park on Tuesday evening, lighting candles to honor the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, as Beijing tightened restrictions on reporters and on the Web in mainland China.

The June 4 anniversary commemorating the deaths of student pro-democracy protesters, believed to have numbered in the hundreds, is a particularly sensitive time for China's Communist Party, which has neither apologized for the crackdown nor provided a formal account of how many died after troops began firing at demonstrators.

This year's anniversary, the first under a new generation of leaders led by President Xi Jinping, has been closely watched by activists to see if the new administration would change its traditionally muzzled approach to the incident.

However, a broad range of suppression tactics appeared to be in force this week, with a number of dissidents detained or put under enhanced surveillance, according to Amnesty International.

Searches on Sina Weibo, China's popular Twitter-like microblogging platform, showed mainland censors were working to scrub even oblique references to the anniversary online, including seemingly innocuous terms such as "candle."

Hong Kong reporters in Beijing said they faced unusual levels of attention from authorities; several were detained Tuesday morning after they attempted to cover the daily flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square. Others were forced to delete videos they shot around the square on the grounds that they were "infringing on police officers' privacy," said Mak Yin-ting, who chairs the Hong Kong Journalists Association.

But in Hong Kong, despite a torrential downpour and lightning, umbrella-wielding crowds swelled during the annual candlelight vigil, chanting "never give up," in reference to the fight for freedom and democracy in China, and singing songs inspired by the crackdown.

The former British colony is the sole outpost in China where public mourning for those who died in 1989 is permitted.

M

According to police, 54,000 people participated in Tuesday's vigil at its height. Organizers, who typically offer much higher turnout estimates for such events, said 150,000 attended. Last year, organizers said 180,000 people took part, a record figure spurred by anger against Beijing-backed leader Leung Chun-ying, who was chosen to lead the city. Police said 85,000 were present at that rally.

One of the participants Tuesday night was Katy Chau, 37, a Hong Kong mother of three. She said she didn't mind the rain. "As a mother, my heart is close to that of the mothers of the Tiananmen Square victims," she said.

A number of mainland Chinese attended this year, such as a 16-year-old student surnamed Lou visiting family in Hong Kong. She joined the vigil out of curiosity. "Before, I'd heard something had happened in Tiananmen, but I didn't know exactly what, not about the tanks or anything like that," she said.

In addition to the vigil, nearly three dozen students participated in a 64-hour hunger strike staged in the city's Causeway Bay, a busy shopping district popular with mainland Chinese tourists.

Among them was Willis Ho, 21, a local college student born after the crackdown. "We think it's our responsibility to help mainlanders understand, because Beijing doesn't let them know the truth," she said. "Many mainland tourists took photos with our banners and of us and wanted to know more details about June 4, so I think the hunger strike was successful."

Organizers in Hong Kong say they are already looking ahead to next year's 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, with hopes of finding a permanent home for a museum on the incident that they intend to open next year. As of last week, their efforts had raised $450,000 out of the $644,000 needed, according to organizer Lee Cheuk-yan, who chairs the alliance that organized Tuesday's vigil. /WSJ 

—Chester Yung contributed to this article.