FT
Counting echoes of Tiananmen in market fall
In a country that ascribes great meaning to numbers, the Chinese stock market’s fall on Monday was a potent and, for the government, dangerous reminder of the Tiananmen square massacre.
The Shanghai Composite index tumbled 64.89 points – a freakish coincidence on the anniversary of the June 4 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing, an event known in Chinese simply as “liu-si” or “six-four”.
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The government, which has long tried to silence discussion of the bloody events in and around Tiananmen 23 years ago, acted quickly. Searches for the phrase “Shanghai Composite index” were banned by censors on popular microblogs.
“According to the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the results for this search term cannot be displayed,” Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, informed users. Other censored search terms included the words “anniversary”, “blood” and “candle”, a reference to a candlelight vigil held every year in Hong Kong.
Word of the stock market’s apparent memorial to the democracy protesters still spread quickly on the internet, where another odd coincidence was also noted. The market had opened at 2,346.98 points. With a little bit of parsing, the message seemed clear: 23 for the 23rd anniversary of the killings, and 46.98 was the infamous date rendered backwards.
“Looking at the opening and the drop of the market today, I finally realise that there truly is a big force behind its movements,” said Wang Chunxiao, a Weibo blogger.
Monday’s drop of 2.7 per cent also marked the biggest daily fall in the main Chinese equity index since November last year.
The Communist party’s official verdicton the events of June 4 1989 concluded that the actions of China’s leaders were justified to “quell a counter-revolutionary rebellion”. Since then, the party has worked to erase all trace of the incident from public memory and discourse within China.
However, with Chinese travelling abroad as never before, and information flowing more freely on the internet despite censorship, the government has had to redouble its efforts to snuff out allusions to the protests.
In Hong Kong, a record 180,000 people attended the annual candlelight vigil. Lee Cheuk-yan, a member of Hong Kong’s legislative council and chairman of the group that organises the event, said attendance had swelled in recent years because of growing participation by younger generations and mainland visitors.
Mr Lee estimates that a fifth of this year’s visitors to a June 4 memorial installation in Hong Kong were from the mainland.
“I have decided to come for the first time because I think it is important for Leung Chun-ying [Hong Kong’s next chief executive] to hear the people’s view on Tiananmen,” said Wong Tin-shing, a fifth-grade secondary school student.
Comments by Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, about democracy and other political openings have raised hopes among some activists in recent months that the country’s leaders might be willing to revisit the events of 1989 for the first time.
But others say that the Communist party is still unlikely to delve back into the most painful chapter in its recent history because doing so would threaten to tear the leadership apart and undermine its rule.
Additional reporting by Emma Dong
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