– Foreign media harassed –
On the eve of the anniversary, Washington renewed its call for Beijing to allow greater political freedoms and urged the release of those arrested.
“We’ve very clearly called on the Chinese authorities to release all the activists, journalists and lawyers who have been detained ahead of the 25th anniversary,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.
“I think it’s time to allow some more space, quite frankly, for discussion in their own country, particularly around this kind of anniversary,” she added.
Foreign news organisations in Beijing have been warned by police and the Chinese foreign ministry against doing any newsgathering related to the anniversary, or else risk facing “serious consequences”, including the possible revocation of their visas.
In one incident reported Monday by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, a French television crew was detained for six hours by police as they attempted to interview passers-by on a downtown Beijing street.
The crew was trying to show people the iconic “Tank Man” photo from the crackdown, when a lone individual marched out in front of a line of tanks, halting their progress.
In 1989, the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown played out on television screens across the world, and Beijing was briefly made a pariah in the West.
But 25 years later, the ruling Communist Party’s authority is intact and its global clout continues to rise in line with the country’s rapid growth, which has taken China to second place in the global economic rankings behind only the United States.
China’s state-run media on Wednesday made brief mentions of the anniversary in their English-language editions.
The nationalistic Global Times contended in an editorial that China “has shielded relevant information in a bid to wield a positive influence on the smooth development of reform and opening up”.
“Chinese society has never forgotten the incident 25 years ago but not talking about it indicates the attitude of society,” it added.
The paper’s Chinese-language edition did not directly mention the crackdown.
But under the headline “Anti-China forces in the West making every possible effort to harm China”, the paper vaguely alluded to the crackdown by accusing the West of “actively provoking trouble for China recently and being very emotional”.
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