The UK Daily Mail reminds us of the reality of what is going on:
This year, it’s been a game of cat and mouse to evade the secret police and the surveillance cameras so we can meet the survivors of the Tiananmen massacre and hear what happened to them.
It shouldn’t be. Last year, the Chinese announced during the Olympics that foreign journalists would be free to work anywhere in the country – they needed only to apply for a ‘ journalist visa’.
We applied – as a BBC documentary team – but heard nothing for months. Our only option was to travel on a tourist visa.
Just beyond the border crossing at Shenzhen, policemen shouted, yelped into their radios and waved white-gloved hands in the camera lens: clearly, old habits die hard.
Arriving at our hotel in Chengdu in western China, I spotted a man beetling through the front door towards us, talking into his radio. A friendly porter? No, he interrogated our driver about our plans.
The next day I realised that the authorities were going to be really persistent when two plainclothes policemen popped up in the middle of a field of brilliant yellow rapeseed, focusing their binoculars on us from just a hundred yards away.
China can pretend that this never happened and can repress any who wish to talk about it, however the fact that China is a bloody repressive state is a fact and until the day comes when China acknowledges that this will be so.
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