![\"AP954684328277\"](\"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/files\/2014\/05\/AP954684328277.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nNg Han Guan\/AP – Chen Guang, a former People’s Liberation Army soldier turned Beijing-based artist, has been in police detention since May 7.<\/p>\n
By Louisa Lim, Published: May 16<\/strong><\/p>\n Louisa Lim is an NPR correspondent and the author of \u201cThe People\u2019s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited,\u201d which will be published June 4.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I wrote my book on a brand-new laptop that had never been online. Every night I locked it in a safe in my apartment. I never mentioned the book on the phone or in e-mail, at home or in the office \u2014 both located in the same Beijing diplomatic compound, which I assumed was bugged. I took these extreme measures because I was writing about that most taboo of topics in China: the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, when soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians on the streets of Beijing, killing hundreds of people, maybe even more than 1,000.<\/p>\n I stuck to my rules doggedly. When I decided to throw out the structure I had outlined in my proposal and take a completely different approach, I waited until I left China months later to tell my patient editor. I didn\u2019t tell any of my colleagues what I was working on in my off-hours. For weeks I didn\u2019t even tell my children \u2014 then ages 7 and 5 \u2014 for fear they might blurt something out at home. Later on, when they began to ask why I didn\u2019t have time to play, I swore them to secrecy.<\/p>\n They managed to keep their side of the bargain. But I realized the strain this had placed on them only after we left China last summer for a fellowship at the University of Michigan. Then, almost giddy with this sudden freedom to voice her thoughts, my little one would approach strangers on the streets of Ann Arbor to tell them, \u201cMy mummy\u2019s writing a book!\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps these precautions were unnecessary. After all, I was in a privileged position as a journalist with a press card and a foreign passport that offered an exit route none of my interviewees could share.<\/p>\n For them, the decision to speak out was made with the understanding that the risks couldn\u2019t be fully anticipated. At the same time, they believe that silence amounts to collusion with a government seeking to control memories. As one outspoken film professor, Cui Weiping, wrote, if people continue to stay silent, \u201cJune 4 will no longer be a crime committed by a small group of people, but one in which we all participated.\u201d<\/p>\n This year the pre-anniversary crackdown has come early, revealing how relevant the events of June 4, 1989, remain to China\u2019s Communist Party 25 years later.<\/p>\n The first round of arrests centered on a group of activists, dissidents and lawyers who held a \u201cJune 4 commemoration seminar\u201d at a private home in Beijing on May 3 . Posing for a group photo, their expressions were neither defiant nor celebratory, but solemn \u2014 as if they were preparing themselves for what lay ahead. Within days, five of the 15 participants were in criminal detention, accused of \u201cpicking quarrels and creating a disturbance.\u201d One veteran journalist, Gao Yu, never even made it to the seminar, having been arrested beforehand on charges of leaking state secrets. Nine others, including Zhang Xianling, who lost her 19-year-old son to an army bullet in 1989 and whom I profile in my book, were detained for questioning, then released. Of the seminar, a state-run newspaper, the Global Times, wrote dismissively, \u201cIt is obvious that such an event, which is related to the most sensitive political issue in China, has clearly crossed the red line of law.\u201d<\/p>\n Judging the exact position of that line is almost impossible, since the law remains subservient to ever-shifting political dictates. Artist Chen Guang didn\u2019t expect any trouble when he invited a dozen or so friends to an empty building on the outskirts of Beijing for the staging of a performance-art piece in late April. Chen, whom I also write about in my book, was one of the martial-law troops deployed to clear Tiananmen Square in 1989, and that experience informs his artwork. But this performance was especially innocuous. It opened with a small girl shining a flashlight around a darkened room, illuminating dates painted on the walls ranging from 1989 to 2014. When the lights came on, Chen appeared with a mask muzzling his mouth. He then whitewashed the walls, obliterating the years. For this, he has been detained by police since May 7. No charges have been made public.<\/p>\n As a friend of his told the New York Times, \u201cPeople want to remember what happened on June 4, but they can\u2019t do it in public spaces. Now apparently you can\u2019t even remember in private.\u201d<\/p>\n Under such strictures, forgetting is the easy option, perhaps even the default choice. As the artist Ai Weiwei wrote on the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, \u201cLacking the right to remember, we choose to forget.\u201d<\/p>\n After all, to remember what happened is to remember the scope of the protests. There weren\u2019t just thousands of students protesting in Tiananmen Square, but hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from every conceivable occupation paralyzing dozens of cities around China. In the course of my research, I unearthed new details about the violent suppression of protests in the southwestern city of Chengdu, where government accounts admitted that eight people died and 1,800 were injured in three days of chaotic fighting in the streets. Witnesses believe that the death toll was much higher. Remembering those untold stories is dangerous, because how many other untold stories exist in a country of 1.3 billion people?<\/p>\n Remembering the demands of 1989 \u2014 the cries for greater democracy and the calls to tackle official corruption, official profiteering and the concentration of power in the hands of a few \u2014 is to recognize how they remain unmet. Reporters have tracked down assets worth $2.7 billion controlled by relatives of former premier Wen Jiabao. Yet anti-corruption activists asking government officials to disclose their assets have been jailed on charges of inciting subversion of state power. When 76-year-old Zhang goes to the cemetery to mourn her son, dozens of plainclothes policemen monitor her movements. One year she managed to make offerings at the spot where her son, Wang Nan, died on the sidewalk beside the Avenue of Heavenly Peace. The next year she was forbidden to leave her home. To this day, a closed-circuit camera is trained upon that spot, awaiting her return.<\/p>\n China\u2019s leaders are personally vulnerable because they trace their lineage to the winners of the power struggle that cleaved their party in 1989. When the current generation of leaders took power 18 months ago, some optimists hoped that they might be far enough removed from the events of 1989 to initiate a reassessment of what happened. Instead, party leader Xi Jinping\u2019s refusal to repudiate Chairman Mao Zedong effectively rules out any acts of historical reevaluation. The party\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n China\u2019s online censors are busy scrubbing allusions, no matter how elliptical, to June 4. As the anniversary nears, judging by precedents set in recent years, the list of banned words and terms will grow to include \u201c64,\u201d \u201ctoday,\u201d \u201cthat year,\u201d \u201cin memory of\u201d and even \u201csensitive word.\u201d History is apparently so dangerous that China\u2019s version of Wikipedia, Baidu Baike, does not have an entry for the entire year of 1989.<\/p>\n Just days ago, I stumbled across \u201cTiananmen,\u201d written by the British poet James Fenton less than two weeks after the bloody repression. A quarter-century later, his words are still true, perhaps more so even than before.<\/p>\n \u201cTiananmen And you can\u2019t tell<\/p>\n Where the dead have been<\/p>\n And you can\u2019t tell<\/p>\n What happened then<\/p>\n And you can\u2019t speak<\/p>\n Of Tiananmen.\u201d Ng Han Guan\/AP – Chen Guang … Continue reading
\nThe contours of today\u2019s brash, powerful China were shaped by decisions made in the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown. It was then that the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, pushed economic liberalization without any political reforms, a pattern that continues to this day, allowing disposable incomes to increase 1,700 percent since 1989. He put in place a massive patriotic education campaign, which has fostered a generation of young Chinese nationalists. He also laid the groundwork for the ballooning security apparatus, tasked with preventing the spread of protests by monitoring those from whom the public needs protection \u2014 such as bereaved mothers who refuse to forget how the state killed their children.<\/p>\n
\nIs broad and clean<\/p>\n
\nFrom The Washingtou Post
\nhttp:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/dangerous-memories-of-tiananmen-square\/2014\/05\/16\/16dfe888-d9de-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"