Tiananmen Crackdown ‘Will Not Disappear In The Torrent Of History’: Taiwan President Jhon 1 month ago Text size Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said Tuesday that the memory of Beijing's deadly crackdown on Tiananmen Square "will not disappear in the torrent of history" in a post commemorating the 35th anniversary of the event. Discussion of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989 is highly sensitive for China's communist leaders, and any mention of it is strictly censored on the mainland. But autonomous Taiwan commemorates the date with an annual vigil, scheduled for 6:40 pm at Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. "The memories of June 4 will not disappear in the torrent of history, and we will continue to work hard to keep this historic memory alive and reach everyone who cares about Chinese democracy," Lai said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. "As this reminds us that democracy and freedom are not easy to achieve, we must... respond to autocracy with freedom, confront the spread of authoritarianism with courage." China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, but the island has its own government, army and currency, and its new president, Lai, is considered a "dangerous separatist" by leaders in Beijing. In 1989, Beijing sent troops and tanks into the capital's Tiananmen Square to break up peaceful protests, brutally crushing a wave of demonstrations calling for political change for weeks. Hundreds of people (by some estimates, more than 1,000) died. Many young people today are unaware of the events of 1989 due to extensive censorship. bur-dhc/smw