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
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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
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commentary said.
In neighboring Shaanxi prov-
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its area by creating 30.5 square
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such project attempted on loess, a
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project has destroyed farmlands
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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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