Hong Kong (Bloomberg) — Hong Kong’s annual commemoration of the Tiananmen Square crackdown attracted tens of thousands of people after a pro-Beijing politician downplayed the events of June 1989.About 28,000 people overflowed six soccer pitches late yesterday in Causeway Bay’s Victoria Park where the vigil is held, according to an estimate by Hong Kong police. Event organisers said 55,000 people attended.

“I have to tell my child what really happened 18 years ago,” said Ray Fok, 39, who went to the rally with his wife and their seven-year-old son. “What Ma Lik said was a total denial of what happened. China owes the victims an explanation.”

The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which organised the candlelit vigil, took out advertisements in four newspapers condemning the May 15 comments of Ma Lik that there was no “massacre.” Ma, head of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, later apologised for “rash and frivolous” remarks.

Hong Kong, with its separate legal system, is the only place in China that marks the June 4 crackdown, which occurred eight years before the former British colony returned to Chinese rule. More than 40,000 attended the vigil last year and in 2005, according to organisers, down from more than 80,000 in 2004, the year China ruled out full democracy in the city.

Peter Wong, a Hong Kong-based delegate of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, yesterday joined Ma by saying “using the term of massacre is wrong” because it should be applied to incidents such as the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans wars and religious conflicts.

“We all saw what happened in Tiananmen Square,” Wong said in comments broadcast during a program on Radio Television Hong Kong. Soldiers “didn’t go there deliberately to kill people. The intention of the government was to maintain the order of the city and the country.”

China’s government sent troops to clear Tiananmen Square after weeks of pro-democracy protests in an operation that killed more than 1,000 people, according to some accounts. The government has maintained the democracy protesters were part of a counter-revolutionary movement.

About a million people — out of a population that was then 5.7 million — turned out in Hong Kong in 1989, just hours after the killings.

Jimmy Lai, chairman of Next Media Ltd, said he attended the vigil yesterday “because that’s what a Hong Kong citizen should do.” Lai said he’s missed only one rally since they began, when he was overseas.

Szeto Wah, chairman of the vigil’s organiser, called for the Chinese government to “release democracy protesters, tell the truth about June 4, end one-party dictatorship and develop democracy in China.”

Wang Dan, a Chinese democracy activist living in exile in the US, in a pre-recorded video message called for people to continue to fight for justice in China.

This year’s commemoration came less than a month before the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997.

Fok said economic improvements in China over the last several years didn’t justify oppression.

“Human rights and economic benefits in China are two different things,” he said. “We can’t deny the truth and sacrifice human rights just because we can make a lot of money.”