BEIJING — Police saturated Tiananmen Square with security Thursday, the 20th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy activists, and an exiled protest leader was blocked from returning home to confront Chinese officials over what he called the “June 4 massacre.”
Foreign journalists were barred from the vast square as both uniformed and plainclothes police fanned out across the plaza that had been the epicenter of the student-led movement that was crushed by the military on the night of June 3-4, 1989.
The square was closed Wednesday for a welcoming ceremony for the prime minister of Malaysia and had not been reopened at midnight.
Tiananmen Square is usually closed only temporarily during important events.
Authorities also shut down social networking and image-sharing websites such as Twitter and Flickr, and authorities confined dissidents to their homes or forced them to leave Beijing, part of sweeping efforts to prevent online debate or organized commemorations.
In a further sign of the government’s unwavering hard-line stance toward the protests, the second most-wanted student leader from 1989 said he was denied entry to the southern Chinese territory of Macau.
Wu’er Kaixi, who has been in exile since fleeing China after the crackdown, traveled to Macau on Wednesday to turn himself in to authorities in a bid to return home. Immigration officers pulled him aside and demanded that he fly back to Taiwan, something he vowed to resist.
“If they disagree with my behavior, they can arrest me. I can accept that. But I won’t let them deport me,” he said by phone, adding that he was being detained in a small room at the Macau airport’s immigration offices.
Wu’er rose to fame in 1989 as a pajama-clad hunger striker haranguing then-premier Li Peng at a televised meeting during the protests. Named No. 2 on the government’s list of 21 most-wanted student leaders after the crackdown, he escaped and has lived in exile in Taiwan, where he has worked as a businessman and political commentator.
Wu’er said in a statement issued through a friend that he wanted to visit his parents — who haven’t been allowed to visit him in Taiwan — and engage the government in a public dialogue about Tiananmen through his court trial.
Beijing has never allowed an independent probe into the military’s crushing of the protests, in which possibly thousands of students, activists and ordinary citizens were killed.
