Hundreds joined on Saturday the annual candle light vigil to commemorate those who died in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.
Three decades on and the bloody events continue to divide opinions, in Macau and beyond.
Once more, hundreds joined a candle-light vigil in Macau to honour those killed on June, 4th 1989 when Chinese troops crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing.
If anything, the memorial signals that even after 27 years many still refuse to forget the bloody event which, by some estimates, resulted in the death of hundreds of unarmed civilians.
In mainland China, however, the discussion or even remembrance of the massacre has been largely suppressed.
In the media, on the internet, in textbooks.
Nearly three decades on, Tiananmen remains an open wound.
One which many still ignore, while others regret.
“I don’t know much about it so I read it now. This is my first time to know it,” says a Zhuhai resident.
“Everything is under control (of the Central government) and they never really talked about the movement, the injuries or anything about that. I have friends from mainland China when I studied years ago in university, they never heard of this,” added a Hong Kong resident.
An American-born Chinese tourist said: I just know that students were on the street and they were asking for having human rights and honestly no one told about what really happened. There are two sides of the story, even from my parents side. Some of them (older generations) still don’t believe if it’s something the government did something. It’s just the organisation, when they organised the movement, it wasn’t properly organised so they probably did something not exactly according to the plan and there was a misfire and then it just became a chaos like any chaos could happen. I guess that my parents and my parents’ friends talk about it. They sometimes (still) debate about what really happened. I don’t know the two sides of the story.”
Previous vigils saw local pro-democracy groups calling for the official vindication of the crackdown and rehabilitation of the victims.
This year, much like it has been since the first vigil in 1995, those who joined advocated for nothing less than that.
(Macau News / TDM)
