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pampango

(24,692 posts) Wed Jun 4, 2014, 02:41 PM Jun 2014

Tiananmen anniversary marked at huge Hong Kong vigil

The candles turned Hong Kong's Victoria Park into a sea of flickering light

Tens of thousands have gathered in Hong Kong for the only major commemoration in China of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.

The organisers said some 180,000 attended the vigil, but the police put the crowd size at just under 100,000.

The city retains civil liberties not permitted to mainland Chinese.

It was a solemn, emotional evening filled with music and video appearances from well-known Chinese dissidents. They called on the Chinese government to apologise for the crackdown, to come clean on exactly what happened and on how many people were killed, and to commit themselves to democratic reforms.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-27702206

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Tiananmen anniversary marked at huge Hong Kong vigil (Original Post) pampango Jun 2014 OP

Good article on Deadspin Va Lefty Jun 2014 #1

Va Lefty

(6,252 posts)

1. Good article on Deadspin

Reply to pampango (Original post)

Wed Jun 4, 2014, 02:58 PM

Jun 2014

http://gawker.com/twenty-five-years-later-it-is-always-june-4-1989-1585624885/+tcraggs22

"Why do we care about the June 4 Incident? Nothing that happened 25 years ago in the heart of Beijing came close, in violence and horror, to the slaughter now ongoing in Syria, to pick a convenient contemporary situation. Hadn't Mexico slaughtered protesters weeks before the 1968 Olympics? For that matter, hadn't our own National Guard shot our own student protesters? After Tian'anmen, from his retirement, Richard Nixon gave reassurances to the Chinese on precisely that point: that sometimes a nation must do what it needs to do, to get an uncertain situation under control. (This anecdote, ever since I encountered it, has seemed to me to be the only fact history needs about Richard Nixon)."

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