China urged to carry over quake openness to Tiananmen

By Benjamin Kang Lim and Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) - The most senior Chinese official jailed for sympathizing with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has urged the leadership to come clean on why the pro-democracy movement was crushed.

The demonstrations that drew more than a million people on to Beijing's streets ended in a military crackdown on June 4 of that year. Now a fading memory -- or no memory at all for young people -- the massacre is still taboo in the Chinese media.

But Bao Tong, once the top aide to purged Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang, argued that China has been praised for its transparency in handling the devastating May 12 earthquake and should also reveal the rifts in the leadership that led to the massacre.

"Through this quake ... they have tasted the benefits of openness and should know that openness is better than being closed," Bao told Reuters in an interview at his Beijing home.

"June 4 of 19 years ago was a man-made disaster, but like natural disasters it should be made known to the people of the entire country and the whole world," said Bao, who was jailed for seven years and remains an outspoken critic of the government.

The square bustled with tourists and police, uniformed and plain-clothed, with no signs of protest on Wednesday.

"You think today is still a sensitive day?" one woman selling souvenirs on the square said. "That was a long time ago. It was a period of chaos that the government handled well."

But plainclothes and ordinary police manhandled veteran dissident Liu Xiaobo as he tried to leave his home to visit his father-in-law, Liu's wife Liu Xia told Reuters.

"They grabbed him by the neck and arm and dragged him away," she said by telephone, sobbing intermittently. Liu Xiaobo was later released.

CANDLELIGHT CEREMONY

In Hong Kong, thousands of people filled more than three soccer field in a public park to take part in a solemn annual candlelight ceremony for the Tiananmen victims on Wednesday night, braving light rain in the former British colony.

In addition to remembering those killed in 1989 and calling on the Communist Party to rethink its decision that the crackdown was justified, organizers offered condolences for the victims of the earthquake.

They called for investigations into all the schools that collapsed and punishment for corrupt officials.

In Washington, hundreds of Chinese pro-democracy activists gathered on a lawn near the U.S. Capitol Building for speeches by some 1989 activists and a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"We remember with sadness and outrage how the Chinese government unleashed an army on its own defenseless people," the California Democrat told the rally, whose organizers had erected a plastic replica of the Goddess of Democracy that the 1989 movement had built in Tiananman Square.