In Hong Kong, a Rain-Soaked Celebration of Democracy

BEIJING â€" There aren’t many, if any, places in China where a group of people can shout “down with the Communist Party” in public and not be punished for it. But in Hong Kong, which since 1997 has been part of China but is largely self-governing, they can, and do.

They did it again last night, when tens of thousands of people - including some from mainland China, as my colleagues Gerry Mullany and Chris Buckley reported - gathered in a park in the city’s Causeway Bay district to light candles, listen to speeches and chant slogans in support of democracy in China, on this anniversary of the crushing of the 1989 democracy movement.

Though yesterday’s rally was interrupted by heavy rain, organizers estimated 150,000 people attended; the police put the figure at 54,000 (such large discrepancies in counting have become increasingly common at political rallies in Hong Kong in recent years, perhaps reflecting what many political commentators say is a growing polarization of opinion in the city.)

Here’s what one person who attended wrote on House News, a Hong Kong news Web site:

As Gerry and Chris reported, participants also shouted slogans calling for free elections in Hong Kong, a widespread demand that Beijing appears to be resisting.

“The protesters pressed a variety of agendas,” they wrote.

“A 17-year-old student named Zheng from Guangdong Province was among several holding a flag of the Republic of China, whose leaders fled to Taiwan as the Communists took over the mainland in 1949,” they reported.

“Wan Yun, 47, a Hong Kong resident formerly from the Chinese province of Hubei, laid out documents about a land dispute that she said had brought her a year in a labor camp.”

Here’s a photograph of a young woman lighting her candle at the event:

And this one below shows the heavy rain as it swept over the large crowd, who sheltered under a colorful mosaic of umbrellas:

The rally was held as news reports said that a person long identified in the public eye as bearing guilt for the massacre, the former mayor of Beijing, Chen Xitong, died Sunday in Beijing of cancer.

The parents of Wang Nan, a 19-year-old shot dead that day, said Mr. Chen’s death wouldn’t change anything, the South China Morning Post reported. Mr. Chen, who later was tried and jailed for corruption, was only a small player in the tragedy, said Wang Fandi, a well-known pipa player.

“Wang Fandi, whose 19-year-old son Wang Nan was killed while taking photos on Changan Avenue on June 4, 1989, said that from an historical perspective, Chen had been only a tragic bit player in the crackdown,” the newspaper wrote. It quoted Mr. Wang: “He was just a small potato and a tool manipulated by others.”

“He just said and did what he was instructed to by people in the top echelon,” it quoted Mr. Wang as saying.

In recent years, Mr. Chen had sought to distance himself from the 1989 events, telling the scholar Yao Jianfu, in interviews published in a book, that the crackdown was “a regrettable tragedy,” the Post reported.