The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing in June 1989 was a key moment in my life. I had just started my first teaching job, and it was at a school that happened to have quite a large contingent of Chinese students (mostly from Hong Kong) - so, we were especially interested in the events we saw unfolding in China on the news through April and May that year, felt a particularly intimate connection to them. And thus the wave of bloodshed that was unleashed on the night of June 3rd/4th was a devastating shock to our little community; not only to the Chinese students, but to all of us who had been drawn into sharing their emotional investment in the situation. As the patron of the school's Amnesty International group, I spent much of my next three years there co-ordinating letter-writing campaigns in support of various victims of the crackdown - one of whom, I recall, was a local government employee who had had the temerity to lower the flag at his office building to half-mast on the first anniversary.
Picture from the New York Times
I had hoped our students here might do something to mark yesterday's 25th anniversary - but I wasn't going to prompt them into doing so. And, in the mad rush that is the end of a school year, they were, alas, too preoccupied with other things.
I am glad to see that the occasion was marked in Hong Kong - as it is every year - by a massive turnout for the candlelight vigil in Victoria Park. And I liked Tania Branigan's article about the anniversary in The Guardian today.
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