Tiananmen anniversary: Wu'er Kaixi says protesters moving battlefield from Beijing to Hong Kong

Tiananmen Square was quiet and largely empty on the 31st anniversary of China's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing. Police and armored vehicles parked around the square. Few pedestrians lined up at security checkpoints waiting to enter.

Hong Kong took the extraordinary move of canceling an annual candlelight vigil in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory for the first time in 30 years. Authorities cited the need for social distancing amid the coronavirus outbreak, despite the recent reopening of schools, beaches, bars and beauty parlors. Hong Kong has had relatively few cases of the virus and life has largely returned to normal in the city of 7.4 million.

However, China has long detested the vigil, the only such activity allowed on Chinese territory to commemorate victims of the crackdown, which remains a taboo subject on the mainland. Hundreds, possibly thousands of people were killed when tanks and troops assaulted the center of Beijing on the night of June 3-4, 1989 to break up weeks of student-led protests seen as posing a threat to authoritarian Communist Party rule.

Critics say the Tiananmen crackdown had set the ruling Communist Party on its present course of ruthless suppression, summary incarceration and the frequent use of violence against opponents in the name of "stability maintenance." Pro-democracy activist and leader of the Tiananmen protests in June 1989 Wu'er Kaixi said in Taipei that the protesters in Hong Kong are simply moving the battlefield from Beijing to the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.

"Hong Kongers helped us tremendously 31 years ago, in the Tiananmen Square, after the massacre. I owed them my life. If I could be in Hong Kong, I would be in Hong Kong," said Wu'er Kaixi.