Gao Yu was supposed to go to dinner with a friend on April 25. She never arrived. The Chinese journalist, imprisoned after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, has not been heard from since. Her supporters believe they are unlikely to see her again until before June 4, at the earliest.
In a little more than a month, the rest of the world will mark the anniversary of the Chinese troops opening fire on student activists gathered at Tiananmen. In China, the event will likely be met with silence. On previous anniversaries, local newspapers have led with weather headlines. And those whose voices are most compelling – whose sons and daughters were killed, or who were themselves brutally injured – will go quiet, too. In past years, they have been placed under house arrest, dragged off to prisons or ordered, on threats of harm inflicted on family members, to stay home and keep their mouths shut.
In recent years, the disappearances have tended not to start until later in May. But this is the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen killings, a marker that is already drawing global attention back to China's historic black mark. Each half-decade brings a larger spotlight back to Tiananmen, and a larger Chinese response: in 2009, more than 60 people were arrested, detained or monitored. Key Internet sites like Twitter and Hotmail were also then shut down. (Twitter remains censored in China, as does Facebook and other tools that could be used by activists to organize memorials or protests.)
Ms. Gao's disappearance suggests the response this year will be equally heavy-handed. On April 26, she had been scheduled to attend a meeting in commemoration of a controversial state media editorial that helped to stoke the fires of student protest 25 years ago. On May 3, she was to fly to Hong Kong to deliver a speech at a press freedom event.
Much has changed in China in 25 years – its economy has expanded 33-fold, its cities have been jammed with glass skyscrapers and its rising political and economic might has made it a respected, and sometimes feared, global power. But there has been little change in the willingness of the Communist Party to countenance challenges to its authority, a reality laid bare every year around June 4.
The 1989 student protests constituted perhaps the most potent threat to the Party's rule since it took power 40 years earlier, and the Chinese government has long applied extraordinary measures to have it vanish from memory.
"The Party remains acutely aware that it really lacks legitimacy. And instead of deepening that legitimacy by trying to establish– as Deng Xiaoping and others claimed they were going to do, the rule of law over the rule of man – they are more than ever arbitrarily enforcing the law of the party," said Paul Monk, an Australian consultant who previously worked on East Asia matters for the country's Defence Intelligence Organization.
This year, Internet activists have already received warnings telling them to keep clear of anything Tiananmen-related. In past years, the wearing of white shirts has been banned (in China, white is a colour of mourning, and a potentially potent symbol); foreign newspapers have had pages of Tiananmen coverage physically torn out; candle icons have been banned from social media; two years ago, even searches related to the Shanghai composite index were banned, after the index on June 3 on year dropped 64.89 points, the numerical notation for June 4, 1989.
The 25th anniversary is also set against a broad campaign, launched after Xi Jinping became president, against dissidents.
"More than 200 human rights defenders have been arrested and detained. And this crackdown continues," said Teng Biao, a lawyer who knows Ms. Gao, the journalist who has disappeared.
It is a broad campaign, "not only against human rights lawyers, but also against underground churches, intellectuals and human rights defenders."
It is a reminder that what happened at Tiananmen, though increasingly distant in the march of years, retains a painful relevancy in modern China.
"I feel there has been a change in the social psychology of people in China" in past decades, said Wang Cheng, a human rights lawyer who was recently beaten by police. "But there has been no fundamental change in the basic power structure, be it among authorities or civil society. So there is no possibility of major political change."
Nathan VanderKlippe