The president of Taiwan, William Lai (Lai Ching-te), assured this Tuesday that the memory of the massacre of the Tiananmen Square “will not disappear in the torrent of history”, as this Tuesday marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the event.
“The memory of June 4 will not disappear in the torrent of history. We will continue to work hard to make this historical memory last forever and move everyone who cares about Chinese democracy.“, stated the president in his official account of Facebook.
Lai, who took office on May 20, replacing Tsai Ing-wen (2016-2024), recalled that 35 years ago “the whole world contemplated Tiananmen with great expectation”, in the midst of a “wave of democratization” that “swept the world” and that had young people as protagonists.
“Taiwan has moved from an authoritarian system to democracy thanks to the hard work and sacrifices of their democratic predecessors. “Young people inherit the torch of democracy and continue to deepen it,” said the Taiwanese president, adding that “a truly respectable country” allows its population to “speak out loud.”
“Any politician should bravely face the voices of the people, especially the young generation (…). “We must use democracy to generate consensus, the freedom to respond to autocracy, the courage to fight against authoritarian expansion and the unity to respond to challenges,” he stated. The Iconsidered a “secessionist” and a “troublemaker” by the chinese government.
On the 35th anniversary of the massacre of Tiananmen, China has imposed the usual strict control on Beijing to avoid any mention of the anniversary and banned the traditional commemorative vigil in Hong Konghence Taiwan It will be the only Chinese-speaking territory that will remember the event with an event in the center of Taipei.
The massacre of Tiananmen occurred on the night of June 3 to 4, 1989, when soldiers and tanks of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army They made their way to the central square of Beijingwhere hundreds of thousands of students and workers had been demonstrating for weeks for the end of corruption and for greater political openness.
The death toll from military repression is still unknown and ranges between hundreds and thousandsdepending on the source.
For more than three decades, thousands of people gathered at the emblematic Hong Kong Victoria Park to commemorate, peacefully and by candlelight, the victims of repression, a tradition that was last celebrated in 2019 and which has now been replaced by a “carnival” organized by pro groups. Beijing.
The organizing group of those annual vigils, the Hong Kong Alliance in support of the Patriotic Democratic Movements of Chinawas dissolved in September 2021 after the arrest of its main leaders – accused of inciting subversion – and the authorities no longer allow such celebration, citing the need to “safeguard national security” in the former British colony.
In recent days, on the eve of the anniversary, Police arrested eight people -the last one this Monday-, including a former organizer of the vigil who is currently in prison, for allegedly publishing about the commemoration “with seditious content that incites hatred.”
They were the first known arrests under a new national security law approved in March by the Hong Kong government to complement another imposed in 2020 by Beijing to defuse the massive pro-democracy protests of 2019.
Local authorities have tried to eradicate all mention of the events, so The museum that exhibited documents and objects from the 1989 protests was closed.
Books related to the subject have also disappeared from libraries and, in May 2023, the “Pillar of Shame”a statue commemorating the victims that had already been removed from the University of Hong Kong two years earlier.
(With information from EFE)
