THE TIANANMEN PARADOX

"1984" is alive and well in China, but 1989 is not. "For Beijing Students Now, Protests Aren't Even a Memory" was the headline on Saturday in The New York Times. The story began by quoting 21-year-old "Yu Yang, a mop-haired biology major," who says he barely knows of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and doubts the facts of the brutal government crackdown: "Rumors say so," Yu told reporter Jim Yardley, "but I need a lot of evidence to believe it."

Yardley also quoted other similarly uninformed or skeptical students. One -- asked about Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party chief who died last Monday after living under house arrest for nearly 16 years and who was written out of the history books because he had opposed using force against student protesters -- said: "I don't know who he is. I've never heard of him." Yardley concluded the story, Nor had she ever heard of the Tiananmen protests. [Italics added.]

So what to make of this story today in the Times's Week in Review section, headlined "The Ghost of Tiananmen Continues to Haunt China's Rulers"? It has a prominent pullquote in the print edition that says: The leaders can't erase the memory of what happened in 1989. [Italics added.] Huh? They seemed to be doing a pretty good job of it the day before. The story itself acknowledges that many students "have only hazy notions of what happened" but concludes by quoting Wu Jiaxiang, who worked in the party's central committee in 1989: "The whole Tiananmen affair is like a giant spring that the party keeps repressing. But it is getting harder, not easier, and it is making the party tired."

January 23, 2005 1:14 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
HERMAN WOUK'S LATEST 
It's hard to say which comes off worse in Herman Wouk's latest novel, his first in a decade: the U.S. Congress or the American press. "A Hole in Texas" offers the choice between two emblematic stereotypes: a red-faced opportunist who heads the House Armed Services Committee and a mustachioed investigative reporter for the Washington Post.
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