“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.”
