Will Taoiseach speak out on Chinese human rights?

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.

The reason was the ill health of former premier and Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, a reformer who opposed the use of force against the student pro-democracy demonstrators who occupied the square in 1989.

Mr Zhao lost that battle, arriving at the square on May 19 to personally apologise to the students, telling them with tears in his eyes: “I have come too late.” He pleaded with them to go home, but they refused.

Martial law was declared on May 20, and in the days after, a massacre ensued.

Estimates of deaths ranged between 400 and 2,600, the latter figure coming from the Chinese Red Cross. The Chinese government, for its part, declared the subject taboo. Mr Zhao, meanwhile, was put under house arrest, where he remained until falling gravely ill in recent weeks. He died in hospital yesterday.

A person’s death should never be used as political capital, it could be argued. But it cannot be denied that the timing of Mr Zhao’s death, coinciding as it does with the arrival of the Taoiseach in the country, affords Bertie Ahern an opportunity to broach China’s appalling human rights record. Even a simple statement mourning the passing of a leader respected by the people would convey a message to Beijing.

And it wouldn’t simply be a message from the leader of a small country on the fringe of Europe, one dwarfed by China politically, economically and militarily. It would be a message from the former president of the EU, currently China’s biggest trading partner; a man whom the Chinese pressed on their own issues when they saw the need to.

Upon arrival in China yesterday, Mr Ahern did not immediately comment. Nor did the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Given the thorny nature of the subject, it was entirely predictable that they would choose not to speak of it, at least not until they first heard what the Chinese leadership had to say.

Mr Ahern meets with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the Great Hall of the People, the architectural marvel that is home to the national assembly, in Beijing this afternoon. However, it may well prove one of those subjects politically expedient to ignore.