The most senior Communist Party official to be jailed after the Tiananmen Square crackdown has been banished into internal exile by Chinese authorities, who are anxious to prevent a commemoration next month of the 1989 protests. Bao Tong was notified yesterday that he must return to his home town in southeastern Zhejiang province until after the 20th anniversary of the June 4 events.

He told The Times: “I can’t talk. I have been ordered not to give any interviews. Not even on the telephone. Now I am being taken away to my home town.” The decision to banish the 76-year-old Mr Bao — the top aide to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist party chief who was dismissed after urging dialogue with the students leading the demonstrations — marks the harshest action yet before the sensitive anniversary.

Mr Bao was jailed for seven years and has since lived under round-the-clock surveillance.

This month, however, he took full responsibility for the publication of Mr Zhao’s memoirs, which had been kept secret during the four years since his death. Many young Chinese have little knowledge or understanding of the 1989 demonstrations, although the few participants still active in China are unwilling to let the 20th anniversary pass unmarked.

Times Archive, 1989: Bravery, hatred and ongoing carnage

At noon yesterday, when tanks started moving along the Changan Avenue, I watched as a man in a white shirt ran from a crowd

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Zhou Duo, a former Peking University social science professor, who was with the students at Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4 and negotiated the safe withdrawal of some, told The Times that he had planned to submit a request to his local police to hold a hunger strike in a Beijing park on June 4.

He said: “The police came to my house in the morning and have refused to allow me to go out. They have given me no reason. But it was impossible today to submit my request.”

All such actions, by law, require a police permit in China. Mr Zhou declined to say whether or when he would try again to carry out his bold challenge to the ruling party, which branded the student movement “counter-revolutionary turmoil”.

Chinese journalists have been ordered to ensure that no negative stories creep into their publications or online in the run-up to the anniversary.

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