Call for Justice Silenced on 35th Tiananmen Anniversary

Checkpoints and rows of police vehicles lined a major road leading to Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Tuesday as China heightened security on the 35th anniversary of a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests, per the AP. China has long quashed any memory of the killings, when the Chinese government ordered in the army to end the months-long protests and uphold Communist rule. An estimated 180,000 troops and armed police rolled in with tanks and armored vehicles, and fired into crowds as they pushed toward Tiananmen Square. The death toll remains unknown to this day. Hundreds, if not thousands are believed to have been killed in an operation that started the night before and ended on the morning of June 4, 1989.

The crackdown became a turning point in modern Chinese history, ending a crisis in favor of Communist Party hardliners who advocated for control instead of political reforms. The economy boomed in the ensuing decades, turning a once impoverished country into the world's second largest economy, but societal controls have been tightened since party leader Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Across China, the event remains a sensitive and taboo subject that is heavily censored, and any mention or reference on social media is erased. Police used a new national security law to arrest eight people over the past week for social media posts commemorating the crackdown.

Asked by a foreign journalist for comment on the 35th anniversary during a daily foreign ministry briefing on Monday, spokesperson Mao Ning shrugged off the event. "The Chinese government has long since come to a clear conclusion on the political disturbance that took place in the late 1980s," she said, without elaborating. Tiananmen Mothers, a group formed by families of the victims, made an online appeal to the Chinese government to publish the names and numbers of those who died, grant compensation to the victims and their relatives, and pursue the legal punishment of those responsible. "Some people in the Government at that time should be held legally responsible for the indiscriminate killing of innocents," the group said in a letter signed by 114 family members and published on its website, which is blocked in China. (More Tiananmen Square stories.)