Lee publicly disclosed that an alleged assassin from the People's Republic of China and a HK accomplice had targeted him in 2008 after seizing a hand gun and ammunition.

[15] The New York Times reported that the Communist Party established a top-level committee charged with ensuring social stability during the period of sensitive anniversaries.

[18] The Standard reported a huge security presence in Tiananmen, and all around Beijing, as the authorities remained determined to prevent any commemoration of the mass slaughter twenty years previously.

Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary, the PRC government ordered Internet portals, fora and discussion groups to shut down their servers for maintenance between 3 and 6 June.

This move is widely supported by the public The Guardian reported that in excess of 300 Chinese sites had "posted increasingly blasé maintenance messages on the anniversary".

A number of websites, such as Fanfou and WordKu.com, made a veiled protest at state censorship by referring to the date sarcastically as "Chinese Internet Maintenance Day".

[24] No government officials attended the debate; none of the legislators from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, spoke on the motion before casting their opposing vote.

However, a minor breakthrough occurred when independent medical representative Leung Ka-lau voted to support the motion; that another non-affiliated lawmaker Paul Chan Mo-po (accountancy) joined the democrats in observing a minute's silence during the debate was also described as a ground-breaking.

[24] Three other amendments moved by pan-democrats - one demanding the inclusion of the protests and massacre in school history books and another expressing regret about recent remarks on the issue by Donald Tsang - also failed.

[25] As a measure of its sensitive nature and notwithstanding a sharp rise in public opinion in favour of an official vindication, the loyalist DAB refused to comment on the protests and massacre; at a Legco House Committee meeting ten days prior to the LegCo debate, Chief Secretary Henry Tang also refused to comment when asked by lawmakers.

[12] Xiong Yan, a former student leader of the 1989 protest who was jailed and arrested, was able to set foot on Chinese soil for the first time in 17 years to participate in the rally.

[12][27] The Hong Kong Federation of Students staged a 64-hour hunger strike in Times Square the afternoon following the march, demanding the vindication of the Tiananmen protesters.

At the vigil, Xiong Yan gave a speech in which he hailed Hong Kong people as "the pride of all Chinese" - for daring to defend freedom; excerpts from the memoirs recorded by late Communist Party secretary general and democracy-movement sympathiser Zhao Ziyang were played, as was a recorded message from Ding Zilin, leader of the Tiananmen Mothers group of bereaved parents.