Quote of the Day (Louisa Lim, on Tiananmen Square and the Distortion of Chinese History)

“In this state-approved narrative [of China’s modern-day renaissance], there is no place for the People's Liberation Army's act of opening fire on its own people. And the battle over the memory of 1989 is now a global one, waged in classrooms, in print and online. Academic journals and tech companies have censored June 4-related content. Whether this happens under direct pressure from Beijing or as a pre-emptive act of self-censorship for commercial reasons hardly matters anymore. In one recent case, a Chinese online education company that employs 60,000 teachers in the United States and Canada sacked two American teachers for discussing Tiananmen and Taiwan with their students in China. And as Chinese companies acquire news media overseas, they have direct levers over sensitive issues like the Tiananmen anniversary and human rights coverage more broadly.”— Louisa Lim, senior lecturer at the Center for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in “China Conquers History Itself,” The New York Times, June 4, 2019

Longtime admirers of this blog know that I am obsessed not only by the past but by how we remember—or dis-remember—it. Today, on the 30^th anniversary of the Chinese regime’s massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square, that concern seems especially to the point. 

Louisa Lim’s discussion in the essay from which the above quote comes, on her encounters with Chinese overseas students who were unaware of their nation’s tragic turn away from greater freedom, reminds us that  it’s all too easy for a regime to induce its citizens to forget or even never learn about its past. The instrument of choice: a “patriotic education” that in reality is nothing but a stalking horse for indoctrination, by ensuring that dissenting voices are never heard, by concealing or destroying documentary evidence, by repeatedly denying what millions have seen, until they wonder if they might be going insane.

The classic 1944 film thriller Gaslight depicted a Victorian husband who sought to convince his wife that, despite the evidence of her own senses, she might be going mad. But actual nations as well as fictional characters can fall victim to “gaslighting.” Such is the fate now of post- Tiananmen China.

I urge everyone reading this post to click on the links I’m attaching now to a timeline of the events surrounding the Tiananmen massacre and a Huffington Post eyewitness account of that terrible day.

Oh, by the way—don’t think that gaslighting is a condition perpetrated solely by entrenched totalitarian leaders. It can also be used, more dangerously, by would-be authoritarians—such as a buccaneering capitalist-turned-President who, for reasons best known to himself, insists that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 40 years ago occurred because “terrorists were going into Russia,” and, therefore, “They were right to be there.”

Hideous...all too hideous...