Hong Kong Tiananmen Vigil

[Homicidalheathen]

Throngs of men, women and children gathered at a park here on Thursday evening for an enormous, somber candlelight vigil to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings.

The organizers said that 150,000 people joined the vigil, tying the record set by the first anniversary vigil in 1990 and dwarfing every vigil held since then. The police estimated the crowd at 62,800, their largest estimate for any vigil except in 1990, which they put at 80,000.

The peaceful assemblage spilled out into nearby streets, shutting down traffic. Inside Victoria Park, thousands listened to songs and speakers who recounted the events on the night of the crackdown. A half-hour into the vigil, the lights in the park were extinguished and the attendees lit a forest of white candles in inverted conical paper shields.

Even before the vigil began at 8 p.m., the tens of thousands of people assembled represented the largest crowd for the annual event here in recent years. The only crowd since the early 1990s that came remotely close was in 2004, when the fifteenth anniversary of the military crackdown coincided with a surge in pro-democracy sentiment in Hong Kong.

Around the park on Thursday, numerous banners in Chinese demanded the vindication of the students and other Beijing residents who perished during the Chinese government crackdown against the protesters. There were people of all ages, from grey-haired retirees to young children whose parents accompanied them to explain why they felt so deeply about an event that took place before they were born.

Yvonne Chow, a middle-aged social worker, said that she had come to the vigil every year for two decades and was heartened to see the turnout on Thursday night.

“I am very happy that people have not forgotten the massacre in Tiananmen on June 4,” she said. “I am very sad because it destroyed our hopes for democracy.”

Brian Cha, a 35-year-old interior designer, said that while the twentieth anniversary was an important one, he also came because he was angered by recent comments by Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s chief executive, who suggested that critics of the crackdown should also take into account China’s many successes since 1989.

Carrie Ho, a 35-year-old marketer, said that she came to the annual vigil for only the second time partly because of the Hong Kong government’s decision to bar some activists from entering the territory in recent weeks. The government’s action undermined freedom in the territory, she said.

In 2004, organizers estimated the crowd at 82,000, though police then gave a lower estimate of 48,000. That had been the largest vigil since 1991, when 100,000 attended.

Hong Kong, returned by Britain to Chinese rule in 1997, is still semi-autonomous and retains many individual liberties. It is the only place in China where large public gatherings are allowed to mark the anniversaries of the 1989 killings.

Heavy rainstorms dumped 1.45 inches of rain on Hong Kong early Thursday morning, but the streets dried and the skies cleared through the day. The crowds gathered under cloudless skies and a nearly full moon that rose past the skyscrapers to shine down among the park’s palm trees.

Gary Leung, a 42-year-old interior designer, came with his two daughters, aged 8 and 4.

“I want to see Tiananmen vindicated,” he said. “I feel very old — I hope the apology will come before I die, and if not, my children will continue the struggle.”

When a large crowd showed up in 2004, it was after public pressure had forced the government to retreat from plans to impose stringent internal security legislation sought by Beijing. The local government has not sought since then to reintroduce the legislation.

The push for democracy has lost some of its impetus in Hong Kong over the past five years, as the economy has improved and as Mr. Tsang, who is more politically adept, has taken office.

The success of Hong Kong residents in halting the internal security legislation in 2004, however, had an indirect affect on allowing the vigil here to grow to the huge size it was this year.

“Prisoner of the State,” the secret journal of Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in the two years leading up to the Tiananmen Square crackdown, has just been published here and has immediately sold out. Mr. Zhao’s posthumous revelations about discord at the top of the Communist Party on how to respond to the student protests — he opposed the crackdown — have revived discussion of the events 20 years ago and Chinese-language copies of the book from Hong Kong are said to have been smuggled to the mainland.

In an addition to the usual schedule of the vigil, the organizers played an excerpt from a recording that Mr. Zhao made of his journal. Mr. Zhao defended the students in Tiananmen Square, saying that they wanted the Chinese Communist Party to correct its wrongs but did not seek to overthrow it.

Bao Pu, one of the three translators and editors of the book, said in a lunch speech at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club here on Thursday that it would have been much harder to publish the book here if the internal security legislation had been approved. He attributed the government’s retreat to a huge march here on July 1, 2003, with a crowd that police put at 350,000 and organizers at up to 700,000.

“Those people who were on the streets that day made a contribution,” Mr. Bao said