Police Harass Reporters at Beijing Square

Chinese security forces lashed out at the foreign press corps here Wednesday in a series of incidents of harassment and violence on the third anniversary of the Beijing massacre.

A lone Chinese protester who tried to unfurl a banner was arrested in Tian An Men Square, center of the pro-democracy movement crushed by Chinese soldiers on the night of June 3-4, 1989. A second man, apparently also Chinese, was severely beaten by plainclothes police in the square before being taken away. It was not clear how that incident began.

Police detained at least eight foreign correspondents at the square, confiscating film, videocassettes and cameras, manhandling several and severely beating a Japanese television cameraman. By evening, all had been released, but the cameraman, Atsushi Yamagiwa of the Tokyo Broadcasting System, had received six stitches for a lip wound and was still suffering sharp chest pains.

Police put up roadblocks on major streets leading to Beijing University, key hotbed of the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement. In an apparent attempt to suppress news coverage of any campus protests, they turned away foreigners but allowed other cars to pass. Security on campus also was extremely tight, with bright lights turned on outside the university library, apparently to make it easier for police to videotape any protesters for later identification.

Nonetheless, at exactly midnight, several dozen students in graduate dormitories near the edge of campus staged a short, anonymous protest by smashing bottles, banging other objects and shouting out loudly.

The given name of China’s senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, sounds the same as the words for “small bottle.” Since early in the 1989 protest movement, smashing bottles has been a clear and risky act of political protest. It was the third year in a row that students in these dormitories have smashed bottles on the anniversary night in a kind of memorial to the hundreds of people--perhaps more than 1,000--who were killed when the army shot its way into the center of Beijing, especially Tian An Men Square, to end the protests.

Earlier in the day, plainclothes police moved instantly against Wang Wanxing, 42, when he tried to unfurl a banner in the square. Wang had previously told some journalists of his plans to call for an official reassessment of the 1989 pro-democracy movement and also to air a personal grievance concerning his loss of a job four years ago.