Chinese police were present on Saturday, on the eve of the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen movement, around Beijing’s Sitong Bridge where a rare anti-regime demonstration took place in late November.
At least four police vehicles were visible around the bridge whose panel had been removed, according to an AFP journalist.
Searching online for Sitong Bridge on Saturday resulted in the following message: “no results found”.
The Tiananmen Movement ended with tanks and government troops being sent in to crush peaceful protesters. A few hundred people, and according to some estimates more than a thousand, had been killed.
At the end of November 2022, a rare movement of hostility towards the regime of President Xi Jinping and his draconian “zero Covid” policy shook China. Many demonstrators then waved blank sheets of paper to symbolize censorship.
During this unprecedented mobilization since the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989, the protesters demanded an end to the harsh health restrictions against Covid-19 and demanded more freedoms, a month after the reappointment of Xi Jinping at the head of the country. .
For more than 30 years, tens of thousands of people have gathered every June 4 in Victoria Park in Hong Kong — reverted from London to Beijing in 1997 — for a candlelight vigil.
But since China imposed a national security law in 2020, local authorities have shut down such gatherings, criminalized most dissent and stifled the democratic movement.
Chinese dissidents from Beijing’s Tiananmen Movement in 1989 opened the world’s only museum of “remembrance” of the “democratic dreams of the Chinese people” in New York on Friday, as the 34th anniversary of the uprising approaches.
03/06/2023 14:29:24 – Beijing (AFP) – © 2023 AFP