TWO more Chinese history textbooks found to contain accounts of Beijing's June 4 massacre would be censored if the Education Department ordered, publishers said.
The discovery came as the Director of Education, Dominic Wong Shing-wah, rejected claims he had interfered with academic freedom by ordering the removal of a reference to the massacre in another textbook.
The 1989 killings were too recent to be judged objectively, he said.
The most recent textbooks with accounts of the massacre are for Form Three and Five students. The crackdown is mentioned in a footnote on the shuffling of mainland party officials.
The Form Five textbook says a democratic movement broke out between April and June 1989. Zhao Zhiyang was replaced by Jiang Zemin as Communist Party general secretary after the ''clearing of Tiananmen Square''.
The publisher Lingkee's administration manager, Michael Leung Kam-tai, said the massacre was not mentioned in the main text and the books were examined and recommended by the department.