Tiananmen Square is quiet on protest anniversary

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.

Since the military assault that killed hundreds, possibly thousands, in the vast Beijing plaza on June 4, 1989, communist leaders have made many changes demanded by the dissidents, scrapping rules dictating where Chinese could work and whom they could marry.

A decade of stunning economic growth has given millions new choices in life.

But the closed, secretive ruling party that crushed the protests still permits no independent political activity and has jailed or driven into exile most of China’s active dissidents.

Today, 13 middle-aged men and women were detained in twos and threes in separate incidents throughout the morning as security forces were trying to block public commemorations for people killed in the military crackdown.

The square was open to the public and hundreds of tourists with their children were strolling under a light sprinkling of rain.

Though extra guards were on duty, security was relatively light compared with other politically sensitive dates.

Troops from the paramilitary People’s Armed Police dozed aboard two parked buses. Security agents in civilian clothes moved among the crowds.

In advance of the anniversary, Chinese authorities had detained activists and relatives of people killed in 1989 or ordered them out of Beijing as early as last week.

Broadcasts of CNN to hotels and apartment compounds for foreigners in the Chinese capital were blacked out repeatedly today when the network showed reports on the crackdown.

In contrast to the quiet in Beijing, veterans of the protests and other activists commemorated the deaths with vigils, marches and hunger strikes in Hong Kong, Washington and Taipei.

In Hong Kong, thousands of people attended a candlelight vigil. The anniversary is especially emotional because Beijing recently ruled out full democracy there, stirring fears that it is losing the freedoms and autonomy promised when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

In Washington, a veteran of the demonstrations was in the midst of a fast outside the Chinese Embassy that began on Tuesday.

“We should not just sit and wait for change. We’ve been waiting for 15 years and it hasn’t happened,” said Liu Junguo. “We will probably change our approach.”

The 1989 protests drew tens of thousands of people to the heart of Beijing to demand a more open political system and an end to official corruption.

The violent government response plunged Beijing into international isolation and set off an upheaval in Chinese politics.

Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, was dismissed after losing a power struggle, and still lives under house arrest 15 years later.

Jiang Zemin, a former Shanghai party leader, was plucked from obscurity by then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping to succeed Zhao and went on to lead China through a decade of stunning economic growth before retiring as president last year.

“Fifteen years has marked tremendous progress economically, but still the biggest obstacle is political,” Wu’er Kaixi, a protest leader who survived the 1989 assault, said.

Beijing is still trying to repair remaining damage abroad from the bloodshed, lobbying the European Union to lift a ban on weapons sales to China imposed after the crackdown.

President Hu Jintao, who took power last year, has called for more “socialist democracy.” But that means making the party more attentive to public needs, not allowing real opposition politics.

China’s leaders defend the crackdown and one-party rule as a key to China’s economic success.

They reject pleas to reverse the verdict that the protests were a counter-revolutionary riot.

The crackdown “enabled China to develop its economy and make contributions to the peace and development of the world,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said this week.