IT is the world’s largest - and most infamous - square, covering more than 100 acres. And at the weekend, China reportedly posted 1,000 extra police officers in Tiananmen Square to prevent any protests.

ZHAO Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader who helped launch China's economic boom but was ousted after sympathising with the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protesters, died earlier yesterday in a Beijing hospital. He was 85.

ZHAO Ziyang, the Chinese Communist Party leader deposed after he sympathised with the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, is in a deep coma and may be near death, a human rights activist said.

Police kept China’s symbolic heart of Tiananmen Square free of demonstrators today, detaining at least 13 people while activists abroad marked the 15th anniversary of the attack on pro-democracy protesters.

The man expected to be China’s next leader became the only top politician re-elected to the Communist Party’s inner sanctum today, the most solid sign yet of Hu Jintao’s ascent to the acme of Asia’s largest, fastest-growing country.

They were never guerrillas, hiding in caves until they could make their move and build the China of their dreams.