TAIPEI, June 4, 2024 (AFP) – Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te said on Tuesday that the memory of Beijing’s deadly crackdown at Tiananmen Square “will not disappear in the torrent of history” in a post marking the event’s 35th anniversary.
Discussion of the crackdown at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 is highly sensitive for China’s communist leadership, and any mention of it is strictly censored on the mainland.
But self-ruled Taiwan commemorates the date with an annual vigil, scheduled to take place at 6:40 pm at Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek memorial hall.
“The memories of June Fourth will not disappear in the torrent of history, and we will continue to work hard to keep this historical memory alive and touch everyone who cares about Chinese democracy,” Lai said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
“Because this reminds us that democracy and freedom are not easy to come by, we must… respond to autocracy with freedom, face the expansion of authoritarianism with courage.”
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, but the island has its own government, military and currency, and its new president Lai is considered a “dangerous separatist” by Beijing’s leadership.
In 1989, Beijing sent troops and tanks into the capital’s Tiananmen Square to break up peaceful protests, brutally crushing a weeks-long wave of demonstrations calling for political change.
Hundreds — by some estimates, more than 1,000 — were killed.
Many young people today are unaware of the 1989 events due to the wide-reaching censorship.
