China wants us to forget the horrors of Tiananmen as it rewrites its history | Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala
The state is enforcing a collective amnesia about not only recent political events but those that happened thousands of years ago
Remembering the deaths of 4 June 1989 is no neutral task. It is a civic duty, a burden and an act of resistance in countering a state-level lie that risks spreading far beyond China’s borders.
On that day the Communist party sent tanks to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing, killing hundreds of people, maybe more than a thousand. In the intervening years, China has systematically erased the evidence and memory of this violent suppression using its increasingly hi-tech apparatus of censorship and control.