{"id":1008,"date":"2005-01-23T01:14:52","date_gmt":"2005-01-23T09:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2005\/01\/the_tiananmen_paradox\/"},"modified":"2005-01-23T01:14:52","modified_gmt":"2005-01-23T09:14:52","slug":"the_tiananmen_paradox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2005\/01\/the_tiananmen_paradox.html","title":{"rendered":"THE TIANANMEN PARADOX"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

<\/P>
\n

Yardley also quoted other similarly uninformed or skeptical students. One — asked about
\nZhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party chief who died last Monday after living under house
\narrest for nearly 16 years and who was written out of the history books because he had opposed
\nusing force against student protesters — said: “I don’t know who he is. I’ve never heard of him.”
\nYardley concluded the story, Nor had she ever heard of the Tiananmen protests<\/I>. [Italics
\nadded.]<\/P>
\n

So what to make of this story today in the Times’s Week in Review section, headlined “The Ghost of Tiananmen Continues to Haunt
\nChina’s Rulers<\/FONT>“<\/B><\/A>? It has a prominent pullquote in the print edition that says:
\nThe leaders can’t erase the memory of what happened in 1989.<\/I> [Italics added.] Huh? They
\nseemed to be doing a pretty good job of it the day before. The story itself acknowledges that
\nmany students “have only hazy notions of what happened” but concludes by quoting Wu Jiaxiang,
\nwho worked in the party’s central committee in 1989: “The whole Tiananmen affair is like a giant
\nspring that the party keeps repressing. But it is getting harder, not easier, and it is making the
\nparty tired.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1008","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-gg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}