NICHOLAS KRISTOF on the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre of 1989: Q: You noted that many young people in China don’t know what happened in Tiananmen. Is there a sort of cultural memory loss in the country and if so, why? A: To control a people, you control the narrative. China’s Communist Party has done that quite successfully, and in speaking Chinese it’s difficult to refer to the 1949 Communist revolution except as 解放, jie fang, or Liberation. The Maoist famine, the worst in world history, is known as 三年灾害, san nian zai hai, or three years of natural disasters, even though they were very much Communist Party-caused disasters. And the June 4 massacre of 1989 has been erased from history. But you can only do that so far: Truth festers. And the party has been unable to conceal the mindboggling corruption that is widely resented. kristof.blogs.nytimes/2014/06/04/tiananmen-square-the-turning-point-that-wasnt-a-q-a-with-nicholas-kristof/
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 14:13:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015