150 thousand withstand torrential rain at Tiananmen vigil

June 05, 2013: At least 150 thousand people, mostly young people, Tuesday night attended the annual vigil held for the past 24 years in Victoria Park in Hong Kong in memory of those killed in Tiananmen Square. A storm however led to some black-out forcing the event to be curtailed. Lee Cheuk-yan, one of the organizers, said he was deeply moved to see so many people gathered with lit candles under umbrella despite the rain. "Their participation shows [strength of] spirit. We have shown our perseverance to Beijing."
Because of the bad weather, the program of the vigil had to be shortened and two videos were not sent: one of them Wangling, sister of Li Wangyang, one of the 1989 activists who died last year in prison apparently having "committed suicide", and that of Wang Dan, a leader of the student movement.
Among the participants there were also people from mainland China, who managed to slip through border control. Some of them had small signs around their necks that read "Thank you Hong Kong" to express gratitude to the people of the territory who after 24 years still commemorate the massacre "unworthy of a State."
"The Vigil - says one of them - is an opportunity for us to exercise our rights of expression. In China we do not have this opportunity
Almost simultaneously with the vigil at Victoria Park, the news spread of the death of Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing at the time of the massacre, held jointly responsible for the repression against students and workers in Tiananmen Square. Chen died at 84 from colon cancer. After the events of June 4, he was promoted to party secretary of Beijing and a member of the Politburo. But in 1998 he was convicted of corruption, accused of having pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes for jobs related to the 2008 Olympics. He then tried to distance themselves from the massacre. But in the memoirs of the then Secretary Zhao Ziyang - who was against the deployment of tanks in the square full of students and ousted for that reason - he cites Chen, Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping as the hard wing conservative, fearful of losing power, who unleashed the repression.
Wang Fandi, the father of a student killed 4 June 1998, says that the death of Chen will not change the official line about Tiananmen. The son of Wang, Wang Nan, was shot while taking pictures on Changan Avenue, where police killed many students who were fleeing from the square. Chen Xitong, says, "he was just a figure of little account, a tool manipulated by others."
(AsiaNews)