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HONG KONG - A massive turnout at Hong Kong's candlelight vigil marking the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown re-asserted the southern Chinese city's independence from Beijing, campaigners said Friday.
While Chinese authorities made sure there were no mainland commemorations of the army's crushing of mass pro-democracy protests in 1989, organisers said more than 150,000 people filled a Hong Kong park to remember the victims.
Another 50,000 marked the event in the surrounding streets, unable to join the main crowds, they said. The sea of candles stretched across the huge park, an image that blanketed the front pages of the city's newspapers Friday.
Activists said the attendance at Thursday's event was even higher than the huge turnout on the first anniversary of the crackdown, which left hundreds, possibly thousands, dead across Beijing in June 1989.
"It was very obviously a show of defiance on the part of Hong Kong," pro-democracy legislator Lee Cheuk-yan, one of the vigil organisers, told AFP on Friday.
"(The vigil) showed the endurance of the city in terms of mind and spirit."
Police put turnout at 62,800 - far higher than the figure they have given in previous years.
Martin Lee, a veteran campaigner both for democracy and for a reversal of the official Beijing verdict condemning the 1989 demonstrations, said the vigil had provided a shot in the arm for those pushing for universal suffrage.
"There is hope for democracy in China. There is also hope for democracy in Hong Kong," he said.
Many of the event organisers have campaigned on rights issues for several decades, and they were determined to use the vigil to pass on their message to a younger generation, often dismissed as apathetic and materialistic.
The huge crowd was filled with teenagers and children, many of them born after 1989.
Some arrived four hours before the event began, grabbing the best position in front of the main stage that was framed by a huge banner written in Chinese: "June 4th, 20 years - passing the fire to the next generation."
One teenager, who was born in China but studies in Hong Kong, said she had not been taught about the 1989 protests in school, but now understood their importance.
"What we can do now is take every opportunity to show our need for democracy and show others that we won't surrender," said the 17-year-old, who only gave her name as Zachery.
Hong Kong was handed back to China by colonial power Britain in 1997 and maintains its own legal system, which includes a free press and the right to protest.
As a result, it remains one of the few places in China where dissent is tolerated. Small-scale protests happen most days, on everything from concerns about food prices to anger at the devaluation of complex financial products.
The city's strong economic growth over the past 10 years was fuelled by Hong Kong's close relationship with China, and many thought this interdependence had undermined long-term grievances such as the slow pace towards promised universal suffrage here and the Tiananmen crackdown.
"The turnout sent a strong message to China that the weapon of economic growth cannot compensate for the mistakes of June 4," Ivan Choy, a political analyst at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told AFP.
Jimmy Lai, a leading democracy campaigner and media mogul, said he was not sure how long the fervour from the vigil would last, but said it highlighted the latent defiance of the Hong Kong people.
"The greatest call we heard last night was that the fight for a democratic and freer China must go on, because people's conscience and dignity call for it," he told AFP.
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