"Lies written in ink can't hide truths written in blood." — Lu Xun, writer
Last week, I noted that anti-Japanese patriotic education was one of the significant consequences of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement in 1989. The CCP has also buried the June 4 massacre and orchestrated an organized forgetting. In this final segment, prominent intellectuals intimately familiar with China shared their assessments with me.
Louisa Lim who reported from China for National Public Radio (NPR) and wrote "The People's Republic of Amnesia" (Oxford 2014), emailed me, "The government has imposed amnesia by rewriting its own history, censoring references to the crackdown and punishing all commemorations of what happened on June 4, 1989." She adds, "amnesia is a 'state-sponsored sport,' one in which the general public participates. Historical truth is still dangerous in today's China, and amnesia is the safe option. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool." People trying to commemorate the June 4 jubilee are arrested, crossing a line that embarrasses the regime. Lim recently wrote in The Washington Post, "China's leaders are personally vulnerable because they trace their lineage to the winners of the power struggle that cleaved their party in 1989. . . . The party's ultimate goal is ensuring its own survival, and it has clearly decided that it needs to keep a lid on discussion about Tiananmen in public, in private and in cyberspace."