Tiananmen Square ban for journalists

FOREIGN journalists were barred from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square yesterday as police fanned out across the vast plaza ahead of today’s 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on 1989 pro-democracy protests.

Authorities blocked social networking and image-sharing websites, such as Twitter and Flickr, and confined dissidents to their homes or forced them to leave Beijing, as they ramped up efforts to prevent online discussions about or commemorations of those who died in the military assault on demonstrators on the night of June 3-4, 1989.

Dozens of uniformed and plainclothes police guarded entrances to Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing that was the epicentre of the student-led protests. Officers demanded identification and turned away those whose passports said they were journalists.

The sweeping measures have been imposed even though there were few signs of efforts to mark the protests within mainland China, where the government squashes all discussion of them.

Beijing has never allowed an independent investigation into the military’s crushing of the 1989 protests, in which possibly thousands of students, activists and ordinary citizens were killed. And young Chinese know little about the events, having grown up in a generation that has largely eschewed politics in favour of nationalism and economic development.

But authorities have been steadily tightening surveillance over China’s dissident community ahead of today’s anniversary, with some leading writers under close watch or house arrest for months.

Ding Zilin, a retired professor and advocate for Tiananmen victims whose teenage son was killed in the crackdown, said a dozen officers blocked her and her husband from leaving their Beijing apartment yesterday morning.

Another leading dissident voice, Bao Tong, was taken by police to south-eastern China over the anniversary, said his son. Bao Pu. Bao Tong, 76, is the former secretary to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader deposed for sympathising with the pro-democracy protesters.

As in past years, foreign media reports on issues related to the protests in print, on television or the internet were blocked.

Over recent days, journalists attempting to film on the square or interview dissidents have been detained for several hours for “creating disturbances”, according to the Foreign Correspondents Club of China.