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About The Asian reporter. (Portland, Or.) 1991-current | View Entire Issue (June 16, 2014)
ASIA / PACIFIC Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER June 16, 2014 Tens of thousands join Hong Kong Tiananmen rally By Kelvin Chan CRACKDOWN COMMEMORATION. Tens of thousands of people attend a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4, 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary of the June 4 Chinese military crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Beijing. (AP Photo/Cyrus Wong) The Associated Press ONG KONG — Tens of thousands of people in Hong Kong joined a candlelight vigil in a downtown park to commemorate the 25th anniver- sary of China’s bloody military suppres- sion of protests on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Participants held candles to remember the victims at the vigil, which turned Victoria Park’s six soccer fields into an ocean of flickering light. More than 180,000 people joined the gathering, according to organizers, while police put the crowd size at about 99,500. It was likely one of the largest turnouts for the annual event in recent years. Democracy activists laid a wreath at a makeshift memorial as they read out the names of those who were killed in the military suppression on June 3 and 4, 1989, in the heart of Beijing. The H crackdown killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed protesters and onlookers. Many participants at the rally wore white headbands on which were written “June 4 25 years” and followed chants urging China’s Communist Party to overturn its verdict on the protest movement. Beijing has said the protests aimed to topple the ruling party and plunge China into chaos. The protests remain a taboo topic in mainland China, and Beijing has never given a full accounting of what happened during the crackdown or its human toll. But in Hong Kong, which retains western- style civil liberties unseen on the mainland, the memory of the Tiananmen protests reinforces the widening differences with China 17 years after the territory ceased to be a British colony. “When the whole of China is being silenced, I think the people of Hong Kong, now, with the freedom that we have, have the responsibility to light up the candle for them,” said Lee Cheuk-yan, a pro- democracy legislator and one of the organizers. Warning on bulldozing hills for Chinese cities By Louise Watt The Associated Press EIJING — China’s cam- paign to shave off moun- taintops and fill in val- leys to make way for cities may come at too high a price in the pollution, erosion, and flooding unleashed by the unprecedented redistribution of earth, Chinese researchers have warned. Dozens of peaks up to 150 meters (490 feet) tall have been flattened to fill up valleys and create tens of square kilometers of land over the past decade. But there has been little assessment of the costs and environmental impact of these projects, researchers at Chang’an University said in a com- mentary published in the journal Nature. “Land creation by cutting off hilltops and moving massive quantities of dirt is like performing major surgery on earth’s crust,” the group said. In addition to causing air and water pollution, erosion, land- slides, and flooding, the projects have destroyed farmlands and habitat for wild animals and plants, the group said. While mountaintop removal has been done before in mining in the United States, it has never B BULLDOZING BACKLASH. Earth-moving vehicles work at a site in Baidaoping area in Lanzhou in northwest China’s Gansu province in these December 10, 2012 file photos. Chinese researchers have warned that China’s campaign to shave off mountaintops and fill in valleys to make way for cities may come at too high a price in the pollution, erosion, and flooding unleashed by the unprecedented redistribution of earth. (AP Photos) been carried out on the scale underway in China or used to construct urban areas, the researchers said. One of the authors, Li Peiyue, assistant professor of hydrogeol- ogy and environmental science, said in an interview that the development of cities must come at a price. “But we believe the government should be cautious in promoting the projects before proper experiments have shown that they are technological, geological, and environmentally feasible,” he said. China’s government is in a multi-year drive to move more Hiring Telephone Interpreters for Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese Excellent proficiency in English and second language with strong listening and comprehension skills are required. Pay : $20/hour Location : 707 S.W. Washington, Portland, Oregon Hours : 5:00am to 8:00pm shifts We offer: Part or Full Time positions, Paid orientation, Paid benefits & on-going training and a bus pass rural residents to urban areas to develop into a more modern economy. The first city to expand by bulldozing its mountaintops was Shiyan in central Hubei province in 2007. The transformation caused landslides and flooding, altered watercourses, and increased the sediment content in local water sources, the commentary said. In neighboring Shaanxi prov- ince, Yan’an city aims to double its area by creating 30.5 square miles of flat ground in a project started in 2012 — in the largest such project attempted on loess, a kind of wind-blown silt. The project has destroyed farmlands while filling valleys with a kind of earth that may lack firmness and be vulnerable to “geological disasters such as landslides,” Li said. The authors questioned the cost benefits of landfills, noting that the Yan’an project will cost 100 billion yuan ($16 billion) over 10 years, but that it will take at least that long for the filled-in valleys to become stable enough for building. Jennifer Turner, director of the China Environment Forum at the Washington, D.C.-based Wilson Center think tank, said the mountain-moving projects could leave China with more deserts and water shortages, as well as other unforeseen costs. “There are these uncoordi- nated massive engineering projects,” Turner said. “And I wonder as well ... if anyone’s done any analysis, not only on the water footprint, but the energy footprint of actually constructing cities in this way, because cities need cement, they need steel.” Associated Press researcher Yu Bing contributed to this report. 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