Un-Remembering the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, which began when the ruling Chinese Communist Party dispatched soldiers and tanks to break up student-led pro-democracy protests in central Beijing. It ended with at least several hundred—probably several thousand—dead.

The national tragedy has been effectively erased from China’s collective memory through careful editing of history textbooks and censorship that blocks foreign websites and books describing the events of June 4, 1989. (In state media, the killings are referred to only as a “political incident.”) In her excellent new book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, Louisa Lim, a former Beijing correspondent for NPR, describes an informal poll of Beijing university students in which just 15 out of 100 could identify the famous “Tank Man” photo—the iconic image of a lone protestor trying to block a column of tanks in Beijing.