Hong Kong libraries have removed 29 out of 149 books about the Tiananmen massacre over the last 12 years.
Of the 120 titles still stocked and immediately available for borrowing. The remaining 94 are only available on request, are stored in off-site book reserves, or are housed in reference sections where they can be read but not borrowed, Hong Kong Free Press reported.
This comes as pro-China authorities in Hong Kong are multiplying their crackdown on pro-democracy and anti-China protests. The Tiananmen Square protests were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square.
Discussion of the events that took place in Tiananmen Square is highly sensitive in China.
Posts relating to the massacres are regularly removed from the internet, tightly controlled by the government.
So, for a younger generation who didn't live through the protests, there is little awareness about what happened.
In June 2009, the Home Affairs Bureau made public a spreadsheet of 149 titles about the 1989 June 4 massacre that were in Hong Kong's public libraries at the time, with a total of 1,162 copies available for lending or reference.
By inputting each title into the current online catalogue for public libraries, HKFP found that 29 of the titles -- 26 in Chinese and three in English -- were no longer available as of November 9.
