By Focus and AFP | 2025-06-05

From Taipei to Washington, leaders and citizens honored the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre 36 years ago, defying China's efforts to erase history.

On June 4, 1989, Chinese troops and tanks forcibly cleared Tiananmen Square of peaceful student-led demonstrators who had been calling for democracy, anti-corruption reforms and greater political freedoms.

The exact death toll remains unknown, with estimates ranging from several hundred to more than 1,000.

In China, the bloody crackdown remains taboo -- absent from textbooks and censored online.

Outside China, world leaders and activists are making sure the truth is remembered.

"Today we commemorate the bravery of the Chinese people who were killed as they tried to exercise their fundamental freedoms, as well as those who continue to suffer persecution as they seek accountability and justice for the events of June 4, 1989," US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

"The world will never forget" what happened on June 4, even as Beijing "actively tries to censor the facts," he said.

Beijing described Rubio's remarks as an "attack" on China. The Foreign Ministry said it had "lodged a solemn protest."

Beijing omitted its complaints about Rubio from the ministry website and from state media coverage. However, Taiwanese media posted them.

China's Communist rulers have long imposed silence about the crackdown, with censors scrubbing all online references and foreign media warned not to cover the anniversary.

AFP saw police June 4 at the entrance to Wan'an Cemetery in west Beijing, where victims of the crackdown are known to be buried. Officers guarded several intersections leading into Tiananmen Square on Chang'an Avenue, a broad thoroughfare placed under tight security throughout the year.

On the evening of June 4, a line of buses and a cherry picker partially blocked screens at the German and Canadian embassies showing images of candles -- a symbol commonly used to pay tribute to Tiananmen victims.

Memory, resistance, censorship

In Taiwan, the only Chinese-speaking society where large-scale public commemorations of June 4 are still openly held, both leaders and citizens observed the anniversary.

President Lai Ching-te like Rubio vowed to preserve the memory of victims of the crackdown.

"Authoritarian governments often choose to be silent and forget history; democratic societies choose to preserve the truth and refuse to forget those who have contributed to the ideal of human rights and their dreams," Lai said on Facebook.

Ignoring rain, many Hong Kong natives living in Taipei held umbrellas and candles in remembrance.

A vigil featured the Tiananmen memorial song "Flowers of Freedom," with participants singing together in the rain: "No matter how hard the rain falls, freedom will still blossom."

In Hong Kong, Victoria Park once hosted the largest public Tiananmen memorials in the world.

However, since the enactment of the National Security Law in 2020, Hong Kongers no longer may openly commemorate June 4.

Chow Hang-tung, a jailed Hong Kong activist who once helped organize annual vigils that drew tens of thousands, began a 36-hour hunger strike on June 4.

In a social media post, Chow said her hunger strike would "commemorate this day and reaffirm our commitment." She referred to national security officers as "real 'criminals'" and urged authorities to apologize for her "wrongful" imprisonment.

"History tells us that [the apology] will likely take a very long time -- the Tiananmen Mothers have been waiting for 36 years and still have not received an apology," she said.

Police patrolled Victoria Park and the surrounding Causeway Bay area on the night of June 4, frequently stopping and taking away citizens.

One man wearing a shirt with the slogan "Rehabilitation of the June 4th [Tiananmen Square crackdown]" was removed by police at the park, according to BBC.

Several pro-democracy activists told Reuters they had been called by national security police several times over the past week and followed in public by unknown individuals -- actions they described as intimidation by authorities.

Erasing history with AI

Leaked censorship manuals from Chinese tech firms reveal Beijing's intensified efforts to erase the massacre from collective memory.

Platforms like Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) receive orders to delete any mention or image of the crackdown, including symbolic content, according to classified documents obtained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

A 2022 guide labels the iconic "Tank Man" photo as "subversive" and warns that visual metaphors such as "one banana and four apples in a line" can trigger artificial intelligence (AI) detection.

"Even if you replace the tank man image with bananas and apples, the algorithm has learned the pattern," Dr. Lennon Chang, a cyber risk scholar from Deakin University, in Victoria, Australia, told ABC.

AI now powers real-time censorship using tools like computer vision and language processing. Content flagged by these systems faces multiple layers of human review, with even candles and flowers banned for implying remembrance.

"It doesn't change the nature of censorship, but it makes it more powerful," said Chang. "If censorship keeps going and is increasingly powered by AI, our future generations might not be able to know what happened. It creates a fake world -- a fake history."