What happened on the night of June 3, 1989, in Beijing and the next morning has bothered many people for 18 years. For most, it was disbelief that the central government could act in this brutal fashion towards its people. Many hope and believe that, one day, the Communist Party will reverse its position and accept that the student protesters were patriots.
In the case of Ma Lik, chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, it was different.
He, too, wanted to reverse the verdict, but he was convinced that the popular image of what happened was wrong.
Mr Ma did not deny people died that night. But he questioned that it was a massacre. He pointed out certain student leaders - Chai Ling , Feng Congde , Hou Dejian and Wuer Kaixi - were able to get away and said that if the party really intended a massacre, they could not have escaped.
Mr Ma is confusing murder with massacre. If the Communist Party had simply targeted student leaders to kill, no one would call that a massacre. It would have been a case of political assassination.
What made this a massacre was the widespread killing of innocent civilians, people whose only crime was to be out on the streets at that time.
Actually, Mr Ma's standards for a massacre are too high. For ordinary people, the indiscriminate slaughter of a dozen or more people is enough to constitute a massacre.