More than 100,000 people were expected to attend a candlelight vigil overnight in Hong Kong, the only Chinese city to openly mark the 24th anniversary of the bloody government crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
Residents of the old British colony gather each year at Victoria Park to commemorate the victims, thought to number at least hundreds, of the brutal military intervention in Beijing that ended weeks of nationwide democracy protests in 1989. Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, the organisers of the event, said the crowd would make impassioned calls to never forget the students who sacrificed their lives for democratic reforms.
An official Chinese Communist Party verdict after the Tiananmen protests branded the movement a "counter-revolutionary rebellion", and the events of 1989 have largely been expunged from official Chinese history. But pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong have always found ways to beat the censors and remember the events. Chinese police blocked entry to a cemetery housing Tiananmen victims.
Rights lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan said on Twitter he had been blocked from its Chinese form, Sina Weibo, for a week for sharing "sensitive information" - he urged others to honour victims by posting an image of a lit candle.
