Activists commemorate Tiananmen at Chinese embassy in US

Dozens of activists rallied in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington on Saturday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.

Holding aloft banners and battery-powered candles, about 50 activists including Chinese political dissidents spoke of their hopes for democracy after the failure of the 1989 student protests that ended when the military intervened.

"I feel that people around the world are getting more and more impatient with the communist regime. And I feel that people start to realise that they can no longer tolerate this regime," said Wei Jingsheng, chairman of the Oversea Chinese Democracy Coalition.

The protests by students and workers demanding democratic changes and the eradication of corruption ended on June 4, 1989 when soldiers and tanks chased and killed demonstrators and onlookers in the streets leading to Tiananmen Square.

The government still keeps a lid on what really happened and the number of dead. But estimates from academics, witnesses and human rights groups have put the figure between several hundred to over a thousand.

In the years since, the country has grown more prosperous but the crackdown is seldom referred to by the government or in media and there's little chance of public commemorations being held in the country.

"When I came here... I was shocked because the information about that movement was completely blocked by the government of China, so I wasn't even informed of that when I was in China," said a member of the Chinese Democracy Party who gave her name as Shirley.

The government has expressed few regrets over the killings, with China's defence minister saying ahead of the anniversary that cracking down on the protesters was a "correct policy."