Remembering Tiananmen

(04 June 09 - RV) In Beijing China, foreign journalists were barred by police from the Tiananmen square today, while in Hong Kong, 150,000 people gathered in prayer and vigil in the city’s Victoria Park to remember the victims of the armed repression of the Tiananmen Square protests.


On June 4^th 1989 the leaders of the country’s communist government ordered the army to disperse protests that had lasted more than a month in the city’s historic Tiananmen Square.


A reform movement was already underway in China in the early 1980’s but the events of the closing years of the decade had raised concerns among several more cautious figures within the government.


Hundreds of people died in the ensuing violence and many others were subsequently tried and executed for subversive activity, especially workers who had participated.


The incident drew international condemnation, and led to the ruin of the careers of many reform-minded Chinese politicians.


A pontifical missionary priest with years of experience in China, Fr. Angelo Lazzarotto remembers the protests as a powerful sign of the desire to reform China’s political life from within, rather than force a revolution: