Chinese police have blocked access to a cemetery for people killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests on the 24th anniversary of the deaths.

More than a dozen security officials were stationed outside the stone gate at the Wanan graveyard in western Beijing, which victims’ families visit each year.

Security personnel were also patrolling near the former house of Zhao Ziyang, the former communist party secretary who was purged and put under house arrest following the protests.

Every year on June 4 authorities try to ban commemorations and discussion of the event in which hundreds of people died when the Chinese army crushed pro-democracy protests.

Online searches on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, show a wide range of connected keywords have been blocked.

Tens of thousands of people braved thunder and torrential rain in Hong Kong to attend a candlelight vigil on Tuesday.

Organisers said 150,000 people attended the vigil while police put the number at 54,000.

Hong Kong and Macau both enjoy special privileges and are the only two cities in China where open commemorations are possible.

Activist criticism

Activists have turned to overseas websites to voice criticism of the Chinese authorities.

Rights lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan, said on Twitter he had been blocked from Sina Weibo for a week, for sharing “sensitive information”.

Mr Liu had been urging people to honour the victims by posting images of a lit candle.

Prominent artist and activist, Ai Weiwei, also went to Twitter to make his views known.

“The dispute in this country is basically stuck on whether to light a candle or to extinguish it,” he said on Twitter.

Hong Kong-based advocacy group, China Human Rights Defenders, says authorities have also detained, or increased surveillance of, 10 prominent dissidents.

The Tiananmen protests were the Chinese Communist Party’s greatest crisis since it came to power in 1949.

Deng Xiaoping justified the military intervention – which saw more than 200,000 troops deployed – as being against a “counter-revolutionary rebellion”.

Unofficial estimates of the numbers killed during the protests range from around 200 to more than 3,000.

The Tiananmen Mothers said in an open letter last week that they believed the higher figure was accurate.

Beijing has never provided an official toll for the repression.

At the time, Chinese authorities spoke of 241 dead – including soldiers – and 7,000 wounded. Independent observers tallied more than 1,000 dead in Beijing, without including victims elsewhere.

ABC/AFP